We had a septic issue earlier this week (clogged vent pipe + tree roots in the drain pipe to the septic, which led to shower water bubbling up in our bathroom sink), which let us discover the floor under our toilet has been rotting due to something about a wax seal.
So, since we had to rip up the floor under the toilet anyway, we decided to go all in and redo the entire bathroom.
Monday and Tuesday were for dealing with the septic issue. Wednesday and Thursday were for demolition (I. Hate. Linoleum. Forever.). Today we're starting to reconstruct.
(Check out the 4 layers of wallpaper that were behind our shower!)
In an ideal world, we wanted to get a shower base and just tile the walls...but we live in a house where (as Bill keeps pointing out) the bathrooms are "retrofitted." They weren't here when the house was built, so they are eeeked in. This resulted in our shower drain being off center in the shower base and not really moveable without mucking about with 150 year old floor joists. As a result, we'll be building a shower base with Michigan Mud and something the Tile Shop calls "goof-proofs" to help us get the slope to the drain just right. We got some kickin' cobble-stone like tiles for the base that I'm pretty excited about.
Today we're prepping for tiling. We're hoping to get the bottom layer of the shower base as well as the bathroom floor ready for tiling next week. There is a bit of drywalling we have to do and Bill's working on the cement board for the shower walls right now.
When we pulled out the horrid fiberglass shower form, we were hoping to find treasure in the wall. We always hope for treasure. The walls have never delivered. Dumb walls. We just got a piece of a pipe and a half-ton of walnuts. Dumb squirrels in the dumb walls.
We did make our own little treasure for the next folks that tear down a wall. Bill and I wrote a letter about us, the house, and the world in 2014 and I put it in a Ball Jar with a bit of the linoleum floor I've been tearing up, some wallpaper, and coins. I also included a zip drive with some photos and videos of the house and farm and a copy of some of the posts from this blog. I have no idea if anyone will find it or if they'll be able to do anything with it when they do, but it seems fun.
Back to work! More to come as we (hopefully) make lots of progress.
I love that you and Bill left a time capsule in the wall! I look forward to seeing the results of all the hard work you're doing.
ReplyDeleteLove the time capsule idea too! I know you will love your bathroom when it's done, but wowza that's a lot of work.
ReplyDeleteUh, I would be more cautious about posting pics of code violations in public forums, but thats just me.
ReplyDeleteLooks like good fun though.