Demolition begins on the bathroom

Got the keys this afternoon, and Dale and I grabbed a bite to eat and headed over to the house to tear some stuff up.



The vanity was a real trip to pull out - it goes against my nature to break things up if someone else could use them - on home improvement shows they always show people bustin' stuff up with sledgehammers, when you can usually just unscrew things and take them out in one piece.  Well, that is not the way it worked with this ugly vanity - we had to break the whole thing up into bits.  For such an ugly thing, it was sure built to last!






The walls and ceiling were covered with a smooth laminate - it was contact cemented to the walls, so that was a lot of work to rip out.  We had to break it off in small pieces to fit in the trash, too -- it was brittle and sharp.  And don't the walls look fabulous with the dried glue all over them?!  It actually looks worse now!  All this will be covered with nice fresh greenboard.









My job was to dismantle the built in linen cabinets - this has to go so we can put a shower in.  Again - built to last, and I had to dismantle the whole thing with a sledgehammer and pry bar.  I did save all the drawers - we can use them for storage and I've got a few design ideas they might come in handy for.

So at the end of the first night (and we actually don't officially own the house until tomorrow!), our bathroom looks ten times worse than it did when we started - but we're on the way.  We did find that there was some extra-strong construction that would normally be great, except when you're trying to take it out:  the floor has a 2" thick cement slab (which made us wonder why it cracked) that will need to be jack-hammered out, and the tub surround also has a one-inch thick mortar bed which also needs to be jack-hammered out.







Since it was getting late and we don't want our neighbors to be mad at us before we even move in, we finished up for the night by dragging all the trash out to the curb.  Tomorrow Dale will get an earlier start on hammering out the concrete floors and walls. I've got to work late, so he'll be working solo for a bit.

We also bought a new lockset for the front door - this place had been a rental and who knows what keys are out there floating around, so that's the first thing he'll do tomorrow!