Putting humpty dumpty back together again...

The bathroom was a hundred years of nasty. The brown carpet was the first to go when we finally got the keys to our little house. Putting the bathroom back together has been a long and expensive process that has spanned the time we moved in last spring to now... a year later. We have gone without showers, baths, and toilets... and in the beginning a floor. When we were doing our roof last summer, we also had no gyp board in the bathroom, so I could take a bath(no shower) looking out into the clear blue sky. If I wanted to bathe, I yelled up on the roof to my brother in laws, and all the other men to stay on the SOUTH side, because I was taking a bath.

This is our tub now. We have re-enclosed it in a new box. The tub itself has been refinished. Our bath hardware is fabulous. The shower head is a generous 10" diameter. The shower rod is 32" wide x 54" long. We still have quite a bit of work to do in the bathroom. The flat walls need to be touched up. The window trim still isn't finished, and the floor has yet to be grouted. But we need to keep moving on to more pressing projects. The house needs to be painted and we need fencing.

Bathroom, Feel My WRATH!

The bathroom is unusable and disgusting. The main causes are as follows:

• Clawfoot tub is built into a tiled plywood box, tiles are falling off.
• Carpet on floor holds moisture, allows sub floor to rot and be spongy nasty.
• All fixtures and surfaces are from the 60's rental house period.

       What to do? Tear it all out! After a few hours of pounding, prying and gagging everything was down to studs and joists, the toilet was removed and the OG clawfoot tub relocated to the kitchen to hold tools. It is SOOOO heavy.
       I replumbed the sink and toilet in their new locations as dictated by Hali's cad drawing ;)
Hali wanted white subway tile so we decided to put the clawfoot back in a tiled box. New 5/8" ply on the floor joist with 1/4" hardibacker cemented on top. The walls got 1/2" hardibacker 4' high and green rock for the rest.
       It took many late nights (even after we moved in) to finish the tile. A lot of the delay was due to Lowes backorder stuff, but we finally made it. For my first real tiling job I'm pretty happy.

The Aroma of Stain and Varathane

        So, the floor is sanded as smooth as it's gonna get. I vacuumed up all the sawdust and wiped everything down with tack cloth. LET THE STAINING BEGIN! We chose Minwax Jacobean for it's dark deep feeling. Wearing two pair of rubber gloves was a good idea. The outer glove would get weak and start falling apart, that is when I would change them.
        To get the right color we put the stain on very heavy. A washed out gatorade bottle with a hole poked in the cap served well at squirting out the stain onto the surface. That way I could get enough down to rub in.
        It took a few days for the stain to dry and as soon as it did I put down the first coat of Varathane Satin. It took a few hours to dry enough to put down another coat, in all I did four coats. If you let it dry too much you'll have to sand between coats.

With the varathane curing, I will turn my wrath on the bathroom.

Started floor tear out or "Hepa is my friend"

          I had a realization. There is no way I'm going to get this place live-able and move in in three weeks. I broke down and hired some laborers to do tear out while I'm at work. Since the house is empty and broke down I don't mind leaving them alone. The pay was $10 per hour.....$12 if they worked hard. They ended up getting everything torn out and loaded onto the dump truck (a surprise from my brother, you ROCK Ben!)by the end of the second day. Well worth the money even with the distinct odor of weed in the house afterwards.
          That black stuff on the floors is tar paper. It had bonded to the floor over the last 80 years and was impossible to scrape off. I rented a floor sander, the drum kind, with lots of heavy grit paper and chewed through it. You've got to be really careful wit the drum sanders because they can gouge the wood really easily,never stop moving.
          I followed up afterwards with a vibrating pad floor sander to smooth everything out. There are still some minor grooves and waves in the floor from the drum sander but I don't think I can sand them out anymore....we'll see.

Lots of dust! Get yourself a Hepa respirator.