It's done! I am so happy to tell you all that the master bathroom is demolished and ready for remodeling. Well, like I told my husband… “It's Demo Day, Bitches”! And it was no easy project let me tell you. Remember how it was before the demo?
Here's how it looks after:
Let's take a moment and talk about what we discovered in the the middle of the demo. This was SO MUCH BIGGER than we thought it would be (a phrase uttered by ANYONE who has EVER tackled a remodel). At first glance, we thought that we'd just yank out the ugly brown linoleum flooring, the broken toilet, the moldy shower, the rusty sink, the rotting vanity, the heat lamp (in TEXAS?!?!), the floor-to-ceiling wooden paneling, and the shouldbeinagasstation light fixture. Then we'd just slap up some moisture-resistant cement board and make it all pretty.
But we all have foolish dreams sometimes…
Because we ended up doing this to our master bathroom:
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is The Boy jackhammering our bathroom floor. And why? Because the Old Dude who lived here before us decided to fix a leaking floor by POURING CEMENT ALL OVER IT! ***coughcoughcocksuckercoughcough***
Okay, ahem. We discovered this while I was removing the vanity from the bathroom. A near impossible task due to it BEING CEMENTED TO THE FLOOR!!! At first, we thought it was just that self-leveling stuff and all we'd have to do is use a chisel to chip away the bad parts.
WRONG! We had to attack that floor like it was Jimmy Choos marked half off at a sample sale. And while jackhammering away (while I played Sims 3 – WHAT? I was helping!) The Boy discovered that the floor was actually made up of not just cement but also of rebar. Like “let's make a city sidewalk” rebar.
And that's not all folks. We also discovered that the original leak Old Dude “fixed” was a good three inches thick and had actually cemented the toilet TO THE FLOOR. So, in addition to using a machine to break up the cement on the floor, The Boy also got to bust a nasty old toilet into pieces (insert obligatory “Duuuuude” of admiration here.). And what did we find under the old toilet, cement, rebar, and chicken wire (did I mention that at some point, Old Dude added some random chicken wire to the mix?)?
THAT, m'dears, is a HUGE ASS FREAKING HOLE. What we think happened is this. Old Dude's bathroom got a leak around the toilet. Instead of fixing it, he chose to let it rot through the foundation of the house. Then, when it became dangerous, he left the toilet were it was (and attached only to a sewer pipe) and laid down rebar/chicken wire. Then he poured cement over everything and laid down a piece of linoleum. In the words of Twitter – #epicfail.
Needless to say, The Boy and I were pretty damn pissed off at the two to three feet of hole in the subfloor of our master bathroom (which also included three different pieces of rotting floor joists [you know, the ones holding up our house!] beneath it).
In the words of The Boy, “I am going to find that Old Man and kick his ass. And if he's dead, I'm going to find his grave and piss on his headstone.” Sums it up nicely, don't you think?
Well, y'all – it's been an adventure (did I mention that the bathroom is so small that we had to remove the shower in sections by using a jigsaw to chop it into pieces?). Have any of you done a demo and found something really awful? Or start a simple remodel and discover that you had to do more than you anticipated? Please share – let's pretend that the comments are our own little group therapy (“Hello, my name is Cris and I jackhammered my master bathroom floor.”).
