Bathroom Demolition Day!

As planned, we began demolition on our upstairs bathroom this last weekend. (I'm sure it will take months to complete, haha)

We're fortunate in that our bathroom gets a lot of

light, and it wasn't extremely small despite the age of the farmhouse.  We had good bones to work with, but we're hoping to give the bath a more 'farmhouse' style and upgrade to a larger vanity by removing the closet.  I was also excited to get a new tub, as the tub we had was a little stained and dingy.

Here's some before photos:

I clearly made no effort to beautify the bathroom before taking
these before photos...

My only real involvement in the demo was emptying the 

vanity and the closet and moving the contents to another room for storage during the renovation.  I also helped Clint take down 

the mirror, lights, and door - and of course took 

pictures of the process throughout.

But apparently when you're pregnant and under the 

weather, you don't get to be involved in the REAL demo work.

(I won't lie, I didn't mind laying about while 

the men did their thing...)

That said, I'd like to give a HUGE shout out to Clint's 

brother Erin and his dad Tom for coming to help with the demolition.  When Clint and I recently demolished just 1 small closet, it took us hours... I have no idea how long the full

bathroom demo would have taken without their help!

Everything got taken out from the back to the front - starting with removing the tiled wall and tub.  Then the toilet, vanity, and closet came out next.  Lastly the crew worked on removing approximately 18 layers of flooring.

You can see that we had several layers of flooring. There's the subfloor hardwoods in the back where the tub was, and the substrate layers on top of it, which apparently included concrete.  The flooring was definitely the toughest part of the demo for the men.
After a majority of the flooring was out, the guys called it a day.  The closet was completely knocked out, and the walls were opened up as we'll have to move some of the plumbing around.

Sadly, there is still a bit of demo work left to be done. The shower bump-out still needs to be taken down, and all of that plumbing and piping will have to be moved/reorganized  to work with the clawfoot tub set up.

Additionally, there is still some substrate above the 

subfloor that needs to be removed.  Once that's done, all of the subfloor will be coming out as well.  There is a slope in the bathroom now that we've pulled out all those layers of flooring, so we'll need to rectify that before we 

put our new flooring down.

After we pull out the subfloor, we'll have to determine if its

better to shave down a joist, build up a joist, or a combination of both to get a level floor, while preserving as much floor to ceiling space as possible.  You can see in the first set of demo photos how low our ceilings were in the bathroom.  Erin is tall (about 6'3 or so) but the ceilings are pretty low.

One cool thing about pulling out the walls was getting 

to see some of the original wood framing of the house.  In between the insulation are *actual* 2x4's.  I'm not sure when 2x4's actually stopped being 2 inches by 4 inches and more like 1.5x3.5, but it was a long time ago.  :)

Hopefully it won't take us too long to finish up the last

of the demo and we can get to rebuilding everything as soon as possible.  Right now we can only use the bathroom downstairs,

and that really sucks when you wake up in the middle of

the night and have to go to the restroom.

Especially when you're waking up as much as I do!

I'm not sure how long this process will take, but I'll 

definitely make sure to update the blog as we go!