Once More Unto the Breach

It's time for a new project! Having renovated both the kitchen and spare bath, we now turn our attention to the master bath. It has the same oddly patterned white, grey, and beige tile that the spare had, as well as a strange peninsula of counter that stretches behind the toilet. Considering that the toilet has an issue where it will periodically fail to stop running and require me to muck around in the tank, that's not our favorite feature. The white vanity is also original to the condo, and doesn't do much for us style-wise. The shower area has the same tile, and also shows some evidence of water damage in a few places where there were had been chinks in the grout between the tile when we moved in. The plan is to leave the tub, but replace everything else. We have large square tiles for the floor, and smaller inch square (mesh backed) tile for the shower walls. Both tiles are a tan colored stone. We also have a new vanity which is a dark wood with a carrera marble top and a rectangular sink. Fancy!

We did the bulk of the demo in one day. We always assume that the tile demo will take a while, but forget that all of the other little stuff is not instantaneous. We spent most of the morning removing the counter, toilet, and vanity. The vanity once again came out in pieces, since it had been plumbed in place which leads to the holes in the back not being large enough to allow us to slip it over the water shutoffs. Nothing that they reciprocating saw can't handle though. With all of the big stuff out of the room, we started the tile demo the same morning. We planned on re-using the subfloor, so the process of tile removal for us is all about chiseling off the old tile. It's a loud, messy business and tends to produce a lot of shrapnel. On the upside, it gives me an opportunity to bust out the mini sledge hammer which is always a fun time.

The bathroom is pretty small (about five feet square if you take the tub out of the picture) so in order to not be in each others way I worked on the wall tile while Mary worked on the floor. With the wall tile (in the shower) you can't reuse the substrate, so it's more about getting a good handhold and using whatever leverage you can get to rip off the old wallboard. It was around this point that we discovered that our downstairs neighbor had plaster and tile shards raining down on him. Apparently the spaces between the walls don't have subfloor under them, so any crap that fell into those spaces (which was a lot, since I was banging liberally on the wall with the aforementioned sledge) was sifting through the timbers of his ceiling and into his unit. I was thankfully able to modify my approach (notice the newspaper stuffed in between the joists) to get less debris into the walls while still getting the bulk of the backer board off.

After lunch, Mary and I swapped jobs. She worked on the third wall of the shower (which has an extra layer of sheetrock beneath the backer board because it's a shared wall with our neighbor) and I on the floor. Mary is not very comfortable with the sledge, so she uses a smaller hammer when she is demoing. This, sadly, seems to lead to more fractured tile on the floor. Once I was at it with the sledge it went a bit more quickly. The small hammer approach was actually better on the walls, however, and she managed to make very quick work of the third wall. What a team! After only one (solid) day of work we had the bulk of the demo done.