Took less than two hours to remove the toilet and sink, pry out the baseboards, and chisel out the floor tiles (sledgehammer, goggles, earplugs). It’ll take the rest of the summer to rebuild our main bathroom. Got the tiles out without gloves, then cut myself pretty good throwing them in the trash. Busted tile sharp as razors. Next up: recondition walls and smooth out flooring with thinset mortar, paint, re-tile, install new sink and toilet, lighting, and new shower fixtures. It’ll be nice to have a bathroom not reminiscent of Holiday Inn.
Music: Brian Eno :: Bottomliners
Did you find that boombox and CD buried under the tiles?
LOL, yeah – and was even more stoked to find the box pre-loaded with the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on the Dime,” as if the previous owners of the house knew exactly what the best music for wielding a sledgehammer was.
Hope you’ve got a second bathroom you can use in the meantime! We did a similar job on our one bathroom a couple years ago. Taking showers next to mortarboard covered with plastic sheeting was not a big deal. Ditto with walking on plywood floors for a couple weeks. But when we got to tiling the floor, I realized that I had to take the toilet out, lay the new tiles down, and put the toilet back all in one day. Not good. That’s way too fast for a decent tiling job, and anyhow the mortar needs more than half a day to set up right. I can’t wait until we have more than one bathroom so I can re-do the floor on this one.
BTW mortarboard is usually much easier to work with than setting down a bed of thinset… you still need the thinset for setting the tiles, but getting a smooth bed is harder than it looks.
I think Scot’s a ‘European’ bather anyway and I’m not trying to sound snide when I say that.
What do you mean by mortarboard Dylan? Do you mean fiberboard? I think of graduation caps and plaster when I hear the word mortarboard.
I hope Miles is way beyond the stage of putting any of that rubble in his mouth out of curiosity.
Dylan, yep, luckily we have a second (very small) bathroom, though it means threading your way all the way across the house in the dark if you have to pee at night, tripping over toys etc. But it’ll get the job done for the next month or two. We’ll definitely be able to take our time laying the new tile. 1″ hex tiles will mean a fairly tedious process of keeping grout off the new tiles. But it’ll be worth it.
The backer board is cementitious concrete mesh, and that’s still in place. Over that is all of the old combed mortar, which I’ll have to partially sand down and fill in with a few layers of thinset to make it nice and even.
Les, if by European you mean “every other day,” you’re exactly right. How did you know?
Larry, not to worry – tools are kept well out of Miles’ reach (though we did have a fun time today learning about the socket set). He was never a big “put the world in your mouth” kind of kid, but he certainly knows how to wreck things if given half a chance :)
I found it in the comments the other night of some long ago post looking for a different post you made on ‘water wars’.