Bathroom Project Day 2

First on the agenda for Day 2 was the tub. It's the original cast-iron tub, which means two things: 1) It's heavy. 2) It can be smashed to pieces for easy removal.

I used the long handle sledgehammer to deliver some house-shaking blows. The tub was covered with an old towel during smashing to prevent sharp fragments from flying.

Before I could fully remove the tub, I cut the drain pipe. I intend to re-route it so the P-trap and drain pipe don't hang down into the future 3rd bathroom in the basement (which is where this picture is taken from).
The tub is history, and now it's time to smash the floor tile.
End of Day 2: All tile, mortar and drywall is removed. The towel on the left side of the picture covers the hole for the toilet.

A project like this is never without some surprises. Here I find a little water damage in the subfloor. It's not too bad, but should be fixed so the floor tile has nice sturdy support.

Bathroom Project Day 1

I took some time off between Christmas and New Year's to remodel our downstairs bathroom. Here are some "before" pictures:

We're not a fan of the avocado/black tile scheme, as well as the oak cabinets that don't seem to fit right.

The sink, vanity and medicine cabinet are history.

Next I take a small sledgehammer to the drywall. I had to be careful not to punch through to the adjacent room. Note that the tile sits in a thick, steel mesh reinforced bed of mortar.


I made a mess...
The ceiling drywall is removed also - could of probably lived with it, but there were already two layers and some history of mold. The bathroom didn't have a fan, but we're going to fix that. It was kinda fun punching the ceiling out from the attic.

Now that the tile is out of the tub surround, I had to wrestle out the steel mesh from the wall.

End of Day 1 progress...

Brand New Basement

The next house project was to clean up the laundry room area of the basement. The plan was to paint the floors and walls so that we could comfortably turn some of the area into storage. This part of the basement probably hasn't been cleaned in the lifetime of the house, so needless to say it needed some elbow grease to clean up.

Here are some "before" pictures. Just to warn you, it's not pretty. Whenever we dropped a piece of laundry on the floor, we wanted to re-wash it.
I guess the old oil furnace was to the left in this picture. I couldn't wait to get rid of these kiddie hand paint art pieces on the right.

The walls have been cleaned in these two photos.


Farley comes to visit.
Now we prepare for the acid etching of the floor concrete. The acid is a pretty nasty product to use, and you need to be fully protected for obvious reasons.

The respirator worked great. I took it off once because I was getting hot, but put it back on once I smelled the fumes. After the acid is applied, it's scrubbed in with a broom and sits for 20 minutes. Then it's rinsed off with water. We fed the hose into the basement, and the floors were rinsed 4-5 times. The water was removed with a shop vac.

As you can see, the floor looks almost brand new after the acid treatment.

There were some stains left - such as what appears to be wood stain and rust marks.
Now we're ready to paint. We used basement waterproofing paint (white) for the walls, and a grey floor paint.

It feels great to paint over these hand prints!

A couple coats later, and the walls are finished! It was almost painting with spackle - this stuff was really thick.

We've had dozens of uninvited residents to our basement - rolly polly's.


Cendy gets us started the floor painted started with some edging.Call me jelly, because I'm on a roll...

We plan it out so we don't paint ourselves into a corner.And about an hour and one coat later, we're done!