What do you do when you’re snowed into your house, the office is closed, and the trains are not running? Demo a bathroom of course!
Since the new upstairs bathroom has been up and running for a little while now, the original Harvest Gold bathroom’s days were numbered. During the blizzard, we removed the walls, wall tile, sink vanity, and toilet. Over the next week, demolition of the tile floor, plumbing, and tub finished the job. The tile floor turned out to be laid on a mortar bed about 3″ thick! The tile floor was almost like a structural concrete slab (and it needed to be, as the 1960s-ish bathroom renovation included some yahoo cutting every single joist underneath the bathroom to run pipes.) Luckily there was building paper under the mortar so the floor came up in huge zillion pound slabs. The yellow tub was too heavy to lift so it fell prey to K’s new sledge hammer.
The last of the demo was removing the waste pipe, referred to around here with fear and trepidation as the poo pipe. The task was not as bad as feared- between a sawsall to disconnect the pipe in the basement and a series of less precise sledge hammer disconnections in 6 locations, the cast iron beast went to the backyard in (barely) manageable sections. Now a big ugly pipe is not the first thing visitors see when they walk through the front door.
Wall between the hallway/stair and old bathroom-
horrible waste pipe prominent on the left
Yellow bathroom early in Nemo Demo
Tile Slab
To carry down the stairs
All that’s left of the tub post-Sledge (actually all big pieces went,
along with the old copper piping, to be recycled at a scrap metal place.)
Waste pipe in the snow- this will go to the scrapyard soon too.
Original Joists- cut, cut, cut by previous owners
all are now sister-ed, and the house is much happier.
After the Demo- next up, this space becomes a ‘reading nook!’
K climbs a Nemo Snowbank
Fixing up with the Joneses 