demolition begins!

It's now official - we are redoing our 1/2 bathroom!

We got home from a busy holiday vacation in NY with enough hours left on Sunday to being our bathroom remodel. From start to finish it only took about 3 hours to take out all the doody-brown tiles and mosaic tile flooring. The hardest part about the whole job so far was getting the "new" sink out of the bathroom without damage. Aleks has quite a lot of plumbing ahead of him.

So, as you can see from the pictures, we had no problem getting the wall tiles out. This included the chunky paper towel holder, toothbrush holder, and soap holder all in the ugly shade of 'nasty' that it was. Since we recently replaced the vanity and light fixture, that's staying as is!

The floor wasn't as bad as it could have been. The tiles were laid in almost an inch of concrete. Because it was done over half a century ago, everything seemed to flake apart and came up easily for us. We're now down to the sub-sub-sub flooring of thin wood planks. Not much, if anything, separates this room from the basement at this point!! (No exageration! I can see our washer/dryer from a hole next to the sewer pipe!)

So there you have it. Our next steps include laying a sub-floor high enough to match up with the sewer pipe (which all has fancy industry terms and names that make me laugh but I can't remember). We've already picked out the tile we'll lay on the floor, but you'll have to wait until next weekend for updated pictures and stories about that. Once the floor is in we plan to put beadboard on the walls to cover where the tile used to be. We'll finish that off with some chair rail and baseboard. Then Aleks has the fun job of getting the sink back in (de-ja-vous) and a new toilet which we'll be shopping for on Wednesday. After the final paint is complete we'll have a much improved DIY bathroom remodel!

We hope you'll all make a trip up north to visit us soon and see all this hard work in person! In the mean time, enjoy our pictures and updates. Stay tuned. We've only just begun.....