My Simple House

Day 1 – Demo and Cleaning – Part 2 (Demo)

By Matt - Sunday, October 14th, 2012

Our first day of actual work in the house started off a little daunting mostly because of how much work needed to be done. The goal was to start off the demo upstairs so that our contractor could go in and start rebuilding the bathroom (the kitchen was next). Must have place to pee… have been told the tree outside is off limits!

Knowing the amount of work I geared up in the suit (industrial dust mask and goggles) and began taking the bathroom apart. By taking apart, I mean rip out everything down to the studs to get a clean slate.

To give you a bit of an idea of what was involved, there was a layer of tile that went about chest high all around the room (which is maybe 5 by 7 which is small). The tile was about normal sized which is maybe 6 inches by 6 inches which is again fairly normal.

So with all this said I started at the edge of the tub hammer and crowbar in hand – about 30 minutes later I had all of a handful of tiles off, progress was not going as planned. Fast forward about an hour or so and I’ve managed to take off a few chunks of the backing behind the tile and to my own chagrin I discovered there was going to be a problem. The mounting behind the tile was about 1.5 inches thick – IN CONCRETE!

Needless to say after about 5 hours some progress has been made, most of the tub has been cleared from tiles but it was tough work. Hammer and crowbar went head to head with concrete and it was a battle! A dusty, dirty, arm exhausting battle.

About 15 industrial garbage bags of debris later we stopped, mostly because there was a trip to Home Depot required. It was about time to rip out the ugly old sink and vanity but guess what – no shut off valves for the water under the sink!

Now this posed a bit of a problem, a big problem.

The car broke down just as we were driving over to the house to the start the demo; specifically the keys were stuck in the ignition and getting the car into drive was… lets just say difficult. Before any demo began it was dropped off at the dealership in order to be addressed.

So again, problem – there was no way to get to Home Depot to get parts. Demo day 1 has come to a halt while we try and figure out how to get to the store without a car…

By the way the new dust mask is AWESOME, the safety glasses not so much. The bathroom is going to take a lot longer than planned.

This was all done while Tara cleaned the disgusting walls – check it out to see how scary it is.

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