One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Our bathroom project has been filled with both steady progress and frustrating setbacks over the past couple days. We keep running into things that weren't really anticipated and they are amping up the difficulty level of this endeavour. Thursday I managed to fill in our holes in the floor. There was some tedious saw work to it, but it turned out ok.

After finishing that, I stuck my head into the downstairs bathroom ceiling to refresh my memory on what kind of plumbing work we have ahead of us. It was then that I noticed something that I had never noticed before. Under the upstairs tub, there is about a 2" step down in the floor. Because it's hidden by the tub, I never noticed it before. Upon further inspection, my worst fears were confirmed. The current bathroom floor is about 2" higher than the floor in the unfinished portion. Sooo, option 1 is to build a sub floor and raise the level of the new portion to match the old. However, doing so will cost more, take more time, and reduce my already restricted headroom. Option 2 is to have a step down in the middle of the bathroom. That's what we're leaning towards right now, but I'm still undecided. Logan was trying to tell me that he thought the step down would look kinda cool, but I think he was just trying to make me feel better.

That brings us up to Friday. Dad got an electrician friend of his to come over and look at the rats nest of wires up there. I was originally thinking we could just replace the fuse box and be on our merry way. Ha ha, not so fast. Ron, the electrician, said I need to not only do that but also run a new main all the way to the street and upgrade the service. The only cost estimate I could get out of him was, "It ain't gonna be cheap". So that put a huge black cloud over everything yesterday. I think there's still a lot of the work that dad and I can do ourselves, but I'm probably going to have to hire Ron for some of it.

So after that big bummer, the whole fam showed up again to start the major demo. First off, dad and I had to shut off the water and put some valves in so we could kill the upstairs and leave the downstairs on. I've got copper pipes now, so that required us to sweat a connection to our CPVC. Dad was a bit unsure of himself since he'd not really done it in a long time. But I had the utmost faith in him. Dad can do anything, right? Dad said I actually had faith in Grandad Hagen, because that's where he learned it all. Here's the result...

This shot is looking into the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom, below the upstairs toilet. Dad got it right, first try, no leaks. He was practically dancing a jig, he was so happy with himself. I was pretty happy too since we couldn't turn the water back on until these valves were secure. While we were working on this, Logan and Megan were busy upstairs demolishing the bathroom. It was soon time to take out the tub. I knew this wouldn't be fun. It was sandwiched in on all sides, and I knew it was going to be HEAVY. After about 30 minutes of beating, banging, pushing, pulling, prying, lifting, and swearing we got it to where we could slide the thing around. I was right, it was HEAVY. It had to be every bit of 300 lbs.

We managed to slide the thing down the stairs and out the door. I feel sorry for the poor suckers that had to get that thing UP the stairs. With the major pieces removed, we started hacking up and ripping out all the old plumbing to make space for the new. Here's me in the downstairs bathroom ceiling with a sawzall.

A word to the wise, always make sure you have sufficient fall in your drain pipes or they will retain a funky and chunky black watery discharge that will come out when you remove them. One word, eeewwwww. FYI, that stylish bathroom you see in that pic is our next project. So, by Nathan's bedtime we had reduced our bathroom to this...

Here's the view from above (that's our dryer down there).

And here's the view from below.

Now I can actually walk through here without hurdling over the toilet.

Here's the hole we wrestled tubzilla out of.

As we were finishing up, I confirmed what Olivia had suspected early on. There's a significant slope in the old bathroom floor from one side to the other. I don't know what we're going to have to do there. I felt amazingly good after we were finished. Despite all the setbacks and looming problems, we got a lot accomplished. Thanks again to all my helpers. Big props go out to Logan for bailing the extra water out of my toilet with his bare hands! Thanks to Olivia also for another yummy construction dinner of homemade chicken noodle soup. Nathan had some, but really preferred the crackers.