Progress -- still demolishing!

One of the things you find out when you do any kind of renovations is that no matter what you gear yourself up for, there's always something else that unfolds along the way, making everything more complicated.  For us, it was finding that there was a 2 1/2" mortar bed under the tile floor and an equally hard mortar bed behind the tiles around the tub.  Getting these broken up was a back-breaking job - enough for Dale to get his back strained so that Friday night, he was very stiff and in a lot of pain.  So we took one night off, then got back to work on Saturday. 



This morning, we picked up a jackhammer so he could make quick work of breaking up the floor.  Within 45 minutes, it was broken up into small pieces that I could carry out, and he was on his way bringing the jackhammer back to the tool rental place.  When he got back, I was just sweeping up, and now the bathroom is a nice, blank slate.





You can see the floor is two different levels -- higher by an inch on the right in the picture above, where the tub and the linen closet were.  We then took off the subfloor in this area - we need the floor to be all one level, so we are dropping the higher section down and bringing the lower section up, each by 3/4" - which will work just fine.  Taking up the subfloor also allowed us to get a good look at the existing plumbing, so we can see how we are going to run the new plumbing.  On the right here, the existing tub/shower will be split into two runs, one for the sink to the far right, and the second shower head near the back of the wall shown above.

On the picture on the left, the existing sink plumbing will be moved to the right and higher for the other shower.  At least we're leaving the toilet plumbing completely alone!  You can also see in the picture to the left, the old wall heater, which was totally rusted out, but the wiring was still live.  When we went to check out the breakers, we were lucky enough to see the bathroom ones labeled.  So we flipped that breaker and disconnected the wiring there and another box that had been closed up.  And since we were still working in the area, we just left the breaker off.

So - while we still had a rental truck, we went to the home improvement store and bought our long list of supplies; wallboard, cement board, plywood, lumber, plumbing and electrical supplies, insulation, vent fans and a window, among other things!  Our goal is to keep the remodel around $2000, and we spent about half that today.  We drove back up to the place to unload the truck and store everything in the garage - and none of our lights would work! We thought it was because we had put in a work order to change the electric and gas utilities over, and we ended up unloading everything in the dark.  It wasn't until I went through the house getting things locked up to leave that I noticed Dale's circular saw had it's powerlight on - glowing in the middle of the dark house.  Wait a minute....I flipped a few switches, and found one light that worked -- it turned out that one of the breakers we flipped had to have nearly 3/4 of the circuits on it -- whoa, we need to check into that.  But we felt pretty silly stumbling around in the dark, when all we had to do was flip the breaker to get light back on!