One Room Challenge: Bare Bathroom: Week Three

It’s that time of the week again when I’m sharing how our one room challenge is going. Well, it’s going… Like most renovation projects, there’s always going to be some hiccup. So let’s talk about the demo and rebuilding of our bathroom.

Taking apart the bathroom wasn’t so bad. We realized rather quickly how poorly constructed it was and that there may have been a previous reno or two done before we moved in. But with our Shop-Vac in hand and a hammer in another, we started taking down everything. When I said everything, I mean we took this bathroom done to its bare bones. That’s when thing got a little weird.

Initially, I wanted to put shelving on the long side of our shower/tub area until we took down the wall and realized there was no way a proper built-in shelf would work. The studs on the wall measure 0.5 inch. So we either needed to put up thicker studs or revise the plan. If we put up thicker studs we would lose space in our already small bathroom or back to the drawing board for us.

We also realized that the insulation was severely lacking on our exterior wall when finally answered why our pipes would freeze so easily during cold winter days. Seriously, one cold day I had to plug in a portable heater and boil multiple pots of water to get our tub to drain properly and get the pipes running under the tub to work. It was always a pain in the ‘you-know-where.’

Removing the tiles in the room became such a difficult task. That’s when we learned that multiple renos had taken place in previous years because no one bothered to remove any vinyl tiles from before. We literally had four layers of vinyl underneath the tile.

Once we got the floor up, we decided to remove the subfloor. After years of super cold floors and walls, and a bathtub that wouldn’t hold heat, we suspected that half of our bathroom was positioned over our porch and wasn’t very well insulated. And of course, our suspicions were confirmed when we pulled everything up and saw the soffit with a thin layer of insulation over it.

The other thing we didn’t anticipate was how difficult it would be to remove the tub. Being a metal tub, it was already a challenge trying to move it. Then we realized the drain had rusted and we didn’t have the right tool for the job. So midway through the demo, I headed to Lowes to but a tub drain remover.