The Bathroom Saga part I

When I bought my place, the upstairs full bathroom had some cracks in the grout between the shower wall tiles, and the caulk seal around the bottom of the tub was in bad shape with multiple cracks letting water behind the walls. So, I stripped the caulk up, bought a Dremel with special carbide tips and a guard specifically made for removing grout w/o tearing up your tiles, and went to town on it. Then, re-grouted and re-caulked everywhere. That was several months ago. The problem was originally caused by a leaky faucet behind the wall. I tightened up the faucet and stopped the leak and thought everything was groovy.

Well, apparently not. When my wife and I installed a closet organizational system in the room next to the bathroom, I took the plumbing access panel door out to paint it and looked again at the backside of my plumbing work. The greenboard that was the tile backing had completely disintigrated. The only thing holding the tiles up was friction and the grout. yikes!! So I called my sister's husband, who used to run his own electrical contractor's business and is exceedingly handy with all things home repair related. He confirmed that this fell into the "bad" category of things to have happen in your home. So I decided to replace the greenboard and re-tile that area. I also decided to take the opportunity to "fix" my bathtub. Over the years since it was insalled, it had broken one of the supports and was no longer level front to back. It tilted toward the front, which was causing the joint between tiles and the top of the tub to be more than the 3/8" that's the largest recommended caulk joint. And by "fix" I mean, replace. I've never liked the tub. It was old, scratched, and impossible to clean since the finish was ruined. And since I'm replacing the tub, now is a good time to replace the vinyl tile floor with ceramic tiles. And since everything has to come out to replace the tiles, might as well replace the ugle vanity cabinet and sink top too.

So began the great debate between me and my wife. Now, I'm no general contractor, but I'm not afraid of tools, or fairly innocuous projects. In the past, I've helped my ex-father-in-law finish a basement, so I've built stud walls, ran electrical wife, installed outlets, light fixtures, and recessed lights, and done drywall work. And helped my sister's husband do some drywall installation. But nothing involving plumbing. My wife was trying to encourage me to have a contractor come in and replace the tub instead of doing it myself. I argued why should I pay someone else to do something that I am more than capable of doing myself with some more skilled help? I think what really put it over the top for me was I told her if we did have a contractor do it, she'd have to be the one to stay home with them while they did it since I'd have to work extra hours to pay for it. I sure didn't want workers I don't know coming and going in my home when no one was home. "Plus my sister's husband said they'd come up and help me, so we can replace the ugly standard faucets with pretty ones like you wanted to do before..."

And so the planning begain. We decided to replace the wallboard, shower tile, tub, faucets, vanity cabinet, sink, floor tile, light fixture, medecine cabinet, and shower curtain rod. And install new towel bars, a recessed light over the shower, and a wall cabinet over the toilet. The _only_ thing we weren't replacing was the toilet. (That is as long as I could get it out and back in w/o breaking it...) Now that the project was growing in scope, my wife got nervous again, but was settled the more she saw me researching what needed to be done, and talking to my sister's husband on the phone. The plans were set in motion. We asked our friend who lives a few courtywards away in our same townhouse community if we could use her shower at night since we were destroying our one and only shower. She graciously said we sure could. (Thanks M!!!) I, with my wife's brother's help, would gut the bathroom the Friday after MLK day, and my sister and her husband would come up (they live 4 hours away) for the weekend and help me install new stuff.

My wife and I started to look closer at the various items we wanted put in. We looked at tubs, vanity cabinets, sinks, faucet handles, medecine cabinets, ceramic floor tiles and so on. And looked. And looked. We finally started to pick certain ones out and take them home. Our place isn't that big, so we just stockpiled it in the living room floor. We spent a week with a net tub still in its shipping carton as our coffee table. Now that we were actually paying money and taking things home instead of just looking at them, we got a little anxious. We realized this was for real, and not just idle dreaming. But we were ok with that.

On Friday, the 20th, my brother in law and I took the day off from work and gutted the room. We first removed the toilet. Pretty straight forward, just turn the water off, flush it, remove the closet bolts holding it to the floor, and lift straight up, over the tub lip and drain the rest of it into the tub. Here's a tip to anyone doing this themselves in the future: When you lift the toilet, go straight up. Do not tip the toilet one way or another. There's a significant amount of toilet water left in the bowl that escapes out the drain in the bottom if you tip it. I'm just sayin that having toilet water drain all of you and your floors isn't the most sanitary... Then we disconnected the water supply from the sink and removed the sink top from the vanity. We kept it in case we needed to see how something was hooked up. Keeping old pieces of things when replacing them is a pretty good idea until you have everything installed like you want it. That way, if you need a part from Home Depot, you take the old one with you and say, "I need this. Where do I go?"...

Then we ripped the vanity cabinet from the wall. Here's another tip: When removing cabinetry from walls, be sure you take out all of the screws holding the cabinet in place. If you don't, you'll rip some of your drywall down and your wife will make you patch it. After we got that out, my brother in law started to remove the tiles from the wall around the shower with a cold chisel, and I started removing the nasty vinyl tile squares from the floor. I tried just pulling them up, or scraping under them with a 12" drywall/putty knife, but the glue held. So I did something I read about and it worked great. I put a towel down on the tiles, and set my wife's iron on super high and heated the tiles up. This caused the glue to release its bond with the underlayment. I still had to work the drywall knife under the tiles, but it came up much easier after that. I eventually worked out a rhythm where I would be removing one tile while just letting the iron warm up the next tile. Since the bathroom was only 7'X5', and 5'X2.5' was under the tub, removing the floor tiles went pretty quick, so I helped my brother-in-law with the tiles next. A drywall knife makes much easier work than a thicker cold chisel when prying wall tiles down.

Here's another home improvement tip: Just like when your moving, and you don't load up your biggest strongest box with your books, don't load up your biggest strongest box with ceramic tiles before making a dumpster run. It gets a wee bit heavy.

Now that the tiles were down, we removed the greenboard from the shower surround. Kind of fun. Just take a hammer/pry-bar "claw" and whack, then pull pieces out. That it is, it was fun until I realized we needed a nice straight edge to match up with the new underlayment we were going to install. So we used the utility knives and cut a fairly straight edge. One of the problems I realized that my bathroom had, was it wasn't greenboard they used in my shower surround. It was plain old normal drywall. I don't know how much of a difference it would have made since my problem started with a leaky faucet behind the wall, but it made me angry with the builders 30 years ago. Oh well. We were replacing it with some new stuff called Hardi-Back. It's a fiberboard that you can use in wet environments (like shower surrounds) or on the floor as an underlayment. Anyway, we only had the tub left now.

The first step in removing a tub is to remove the drain from the drain pipe. These are usually just screwed in place and you use a special tub drain removal wrench tool type thing to remove it. A coworker lent me his. It's a 4 segment thing you stick down in the tub and seat it with the cross of metal in your tub drain. Then you stick a metal rod (About as thick as your pinkie) through this hole in the wrench and turn it while you push down. Now, the metal rod my coworker gave me is just a LONG toggle bolt, and it wasn't staright as an arrow. When he gave it to me, he said, "if you bend it, just try to bend it back." So, my brother-in-law and I took turns trying to move this thing. It would not budge. We seriously came close to dislocating our shoulders trying to turn this thing. We bent the bolt several times. We finally gave up and went to Home Depot for some advice. After 20 minutes of trying to find someone who spoke English natively, or at least fluently, we bought a spray can of Liquid Wrench, and a new drain plug tool that kind of looks like a beefed up tuning fork that would let me use a BIG screwdriver as the metal rod and returned home. I sprayed the Liquid Wrench all over the bottom of the drain connection from the access panel and we again took turns trying to remove it. We finally got it to barely make 1/16th of a turn. So we slowly worked it back and forth to work the Liquid Wrench into the joint until we finally were able to unscrew the drain all of the way. 2 hours. It took 2 freaking hours to remove a tub drain.

With the tub drain removed, it was time to remove the tub itself. I _thought_ I had a cast iron tub, so a sledgehammer would be needed to break it into smaller pieces to make it more manageable to remove. But it turned out, it was made of steel, which just dented when we whacked at it as hard as we could with the sledge. But, since it was steel, that also meant it was much lighter. So no need to bust it into smaller pieces. We just tilted it up, pivoted it, and picked it up. Here's another of my patented Home Improvement tips: Be careful when pivoting an item that's 5' long out of a cubby that's 5' wide. The diagonal is longer than 5', and you'll end up with a nice deep gouge in your drywall, that again, your wife will make you patch. Now we were able to pull up the underlayment that the vinyl tiles had been glued to. It was just dense, thin particle board, so I just pried it up with my drywall knife and mallet.

So, now we have a completely gutted bathroom. The fixtures are all removed, the floor stripped, the tub surround stripped down to the studs. My sister and her husband showed up later that night and checked what we did. They seemed pretty satisfied with the demolition work, so we agreed to meet tomorrow morning at 7:00 at McDonald's to get breakfast and plan the day and make a Home Depot run.

Ok this is _much_ longer than I thought it would be, so check back in a few days and I'll tell you how the new construction went.