Master Bathroom – Big Reveal!

12 Sunday Feb 2012

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I am finally calling it a wrap on this bathroom. There are things I should probably do over, (like a cabinet door–or two), and I will, but right now I am ready to take the lessons learned from this project and move on to something else!

I cannot find my before shots, so I took a picture of our other bathroom, which is almost identical to this one. The master bathroom, was in worse shape, though. The floor had a large crack in it from where the house has settled, and the bathtub’s finish had worn off and was beyond repair, but the tile and cabinets were exactly the same.

BEFORE:

This is very similar to what the bathroom looked like “Before”

I have ordered a turn latch to go on the cabinet over the toilet. Speaking of toilets…who puts one in front of a full length window?! We badly wanted to move this but it would have been too much of an undertaking.

“Master” Bathroom (Part III – Tile)

04 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by Donna in Master Bath

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bathroom renovation, tile

Once the demolition was complete, and the dust removed, we installed the cement board and new tub so we could begin tiling. Tiling went fairly quickly. Norm also took the opportunity to update the wiring in the room while he had an easy access.

I won’t go into detail on the tiling process. There are loads of tutorials out there and I did not take enough pictures to document each step. Instead, I’ll just show you pictures of how it progressed.

“Master” Bathroom (Part II – The Tub)

04 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by Donna in Master Bath

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bathroom renovation, bathtub removal

In my very first post, I said that I would blog about the good, the bad, and the ugly side of home renovation, and this post definitely has “ugly” down. I don’t know if you have ever torn a 45 year-old cast iron/porcelain bathtub out of your house, but it’s an adventure, and one you most likely won’t want to repeat. We had researched all of our options to see if we could salvage the old tub before going to the extreme of tearing it out, but none of them looked to be long-term solutions. It simply had to go. Before we got started, though, we researched all of the different ways to remove a bathtub. We came across videos of people taking a sledgehammer to their tub (it worked!), but we decided to go a different route. The first thing we should have done, was cut off the water main, right? This is our third bathroom reno, we should know that by now. Did we do that? No. We disconected the drain and plumbing from the bathtub to prevent them from breaking. Guess we thought that was good enough. Then the wall that contained the plumbing needed to come out. We did not think that the pipes would be imbedded in mortar, so when were trying to pry the tile and lath loose, a water pipe broke turning a dusty mess into a muddy mess. So, turn the water off before you tear out a wall bearing pipes. This is such a no-brainer…

See that broken pipe?

After we got the water cleaned up, I got called away, leaving Norm to battle out the tub on his own. He ended up taking a grinder to the tub cutting it into manageable sizes, since the tub was too heavy for him to manage on his own. Let me stress now the importance of wearing a quality dust mask and eye protection for all renovation projects, but this especially called for it, since he was grinding up cast iron. Since I was not around for this, there are no pictures of this process. All I can tell you is that it was incredibly messy (and did not smell too great, either)

By nightfall, the tub was history and this is all that remained: