Over the weekend, it was #DEMODAY at our house (well, actually, #DEMODAYS because we did it over the course of two days). Here’s how we demo-ed our bathroom to prep for the renovation:
Supplies:
- Hammer
- Safety glasses
- Gloves
- Chisel
- Prybar
- Drill
- Screwdriver
- Contractor trash bags
- ShopVac
- Angle Grinder (approx. $50)
- Diamond Blade (approx. $50)
- ShopVac attachment for grinder (approx. $35)
Day 1:
There really isn’t much of an art to demolition – it was a lot of hammering, prying, and pulling! Be sure to turn off water where needed (sink, toilet, and shower) and to turn off the breaker if you’re going anywhere near any electric work. We luckily did not have to mess with any electric work (and hopefully won’t need to – fingers crossed!), so that made this a lot easier (and allowed us to have the lights on while we smashed things)!
I hate to waste things, so we tried to salvage as much of the tile as we could. We hammered the outside tiles and tried to extract chunks of tiles from the wall and floor, and then it was easy to break the tiles apart from each other (sort of like snapping off a little square from a bar of chocolate). Maybe we will use the salvaged tile in the she-shed. Or maybe it will sit under the house / under the deck for a few years then I’ll do something with it. Maybe both. (Sorry, Cory.)
We also started off trying to avoid smashing into the insulation, but on the wall of the bathroom that is the outside of the house, we found some mold so ended up taking out all of the insulation. We think this is because back in the 80s when the second floor was added to our house, they didn’t use backer board. The tile was just put onto the drywall as if it was a regular wall instead of a bathroom where there is a lot of moisture. Now we are pretty sure there is probably a ton of mold in the walls of the other two bathroom upstairs (YAY MORE PROJECTS! @JeffreyCourt – you in?!?).
Anyway – I don’t screw around with mold so we will be taking all precautions (as should you!) to make sure all moldy things are gone and that we are mold-proofing as much as possible throughout this process.
We were sure to clean up as much as possible as we went and kept all the doors to nearby rooms closed to try to keep dust and shrapnel out of there, but things still got into other rooms. So we vacuumed a TON throughout the process because there’s nothing worse than a cat or dog with a bloody paw.
Smashing the mirror was FUN (we only did this because we couldn’t get it off in hunks – turns out this is because it was glued to the wall; we had no idea).
The biggest thing we had to research / figure out was what to do underneath the floor tile. One we removed all of the floor tile, the mortar and thinset undernearth was in really, really good condition (smooth, level, etc.), so I wanted to keep it and just put new thinset on top. Well, after a ton of research and calls to my father-in-law, we decided this wasn’t the best because we don’t know what was under all of that or if things were done properly. So we decided we had to make a Home Depot run to buy a grinder, diamond blade and an attachment for the shopvac to suck all the dust and debris up. The shopvac attachment was the best investment – it would have been a horrible (and probably dangerous!) mess otherwise.
Day 2:
After picking up the grinder, blade and shopvac attachment at Home Depot, we got to work grinding. We ground all of the old mortar until it was gone and until we had a smooth, level surface. It only took about an hour – maybe less. Yay for machines.
Some of the old backboard came up (YAY – THEY AT LEAST USED THIS ON THE FLOOR IN THE 80s), so we will have to repair some of that. But that isn’t “demolition” in my book, so that will come in a later post!
