Bathroom Renovation Step 1

If you know nothing about old home renovations, surely HGTV has taught you one thing, that there are always surprises lurking behind the walls.

Luckily, we got a lot of those out of the way early. Well we’d been building up to get a lot of drywall work done throughout the house. Filling in some gaps of where we took down some walls, filling some holes, replacing some shotty work and so on. A week ago, I woke up, took my normal shower then went downstairs to walk Sophia. That’s when I saw it. A slow drip of water coming from the ceiling, underneath the upstairs bathroom.

Nooooo, how could it be?!?! Well it was. And that’s how our bathroom renovation project came to be.

Although we were intending to live with the pink tub and crappy tile for a bit, we knew we couldn’t take a risk of just patching the problem with the bathroom faucet, and risk ruining the new drywall work we were contemplating.

The bathroom as we found it when we moved in (save a better shower head and CFL bulbs).

We know the bathroom was one place we don’t want to mess up. One ill-thought-out plan could make for a disaster on those shiny new floors. So we decided to take our time. We’re lucky to have a fully-functional bathroom in the basement, so we can live with a shell of a room for a little while as we pay attention to all of the details.

The original shower tile work. Pink has it’s place, just not in my bathroom.

The source of the leak: the old bath tub faucet that leaked behind the wall when closed too tightly.

Some broken tile that was barely hanging on, covering up wet drywall lurking behind it.

The 1994 renovation results, outdated, outdated, outdated. Here’s where it got fun. a light flick of a pry bar and the tile came crumbling down. And lovely, crumbly, moldy, wet drywall. It was about at this point, we knew we were making the right decision to completely renovate the space.

And the tile kept coming.After the tile, the drywall was next. A lot of the spots surrounding the tub were so saturated as is, they just crumbled right off.

 After removing the sink, vanity and medicine chest.

Once we removed all of the drywall, we found out, the original plaster was mostly all still in place behind it. Making the job all that much larger in a matter of moments. Also, the craftsmanship of this renovation, and others we’ve uncovered through the house, never cease to amaze me.   

Getting down to the lathe holding the plaster up.

Pretty sure, our house is going to be in a perpetual cloud of plaster dust.Almost done with the plaster.  Mess, mess, mess.

And those are some demolished walls.

Don’t forget to clean up your mess every night!Stay tuned tomorrow, for a BIG surprise that we found, and this one’s not necessarily a bad one.