Weekend 4, Sunday

Ugh. No real progress made as we discovered we had a dilemna. We had decided several weeks ago that we would put down tile flooring in lieu of the linoleum that had been there before. Today we were reading our book on bathroom remodeling and learned that our floor joists have way too much deflection to support a tile floor. The subfloor also has too much deflection. James read a lot of websites and thinks that if we add 1/2" plywood on top of our 5/8" OSB the subfloor will be okay. I will review mechanics of materials from college and see if I can come up with a way of reinforcing the joists. It seems to me that adding a steel angle along the length of the joist might just do the trick. Thoughts?? But, it now looks like we'll be ripping up more of the subfloor.

Weekend 4, Saturday

So, I have recently entered the world of regularly reading blogs and feel that I need my own. I couldn't figure out what to blog about, until today. James and I started remodeling our bathroom a few weeks ago. Today I took a picture of him all decked out in his safety gear and decided that I would blog about our bathroom renovation.

This renovation is many years in the making. We noticed the shower had problems shortly after moving in. We removed the shower door and re-caulked the shower and then put the door back on. This did the trick for a while, but we still had water on the floor every time we showered.

We called in a few companies. One guy said all we needed was a new door - $300. The other guy said they could do the work, but wanted to remove the kitchen ceiling to address some of their concerns which is a problem because we have stucco ceiling that is difficult to duplicate. We disagreed that the ceiling needed to be replaced so we didn't hire them. Guy #2 estimate - $8,000. The last guy had us doing all these fantastic upgrades, but it still would have been a dinky master bath - $32,000. So we put off the remodel for a while.

About 8 months ago the linoleum tile in the threshold started to crack, so we stopped using the shower and planned to start the renovation in January. But, I ended up working too many weekends so we kept pushing it off. Now, we've started, but neither of us has ever done anything like this before so, there's a first time for everything!

Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to start taking pictures before we started.

Weekend 1: Cut hole in closet side of shower wall and install cold and hot water shut-off valves.
Weekend 2: Take out most of old fiberglass shower stall. The shower pan didn't want to come out.
Weekend 3: After conferring with several people we dremeled around the drain and were able to remove most of the shower pan. Determined what part of subfloor needed to be removed.












Weekend 4, Saturday: Demo wall over top of damaged subfloor. Remove subfloor using just about every tool we own (and have borrowed): Sawzall, jigsaw, hand saw, hack saw, drill, circular saw, and James's brute strength. Result: no structural damage created by us or water!