Day 514: The Deconstruction of a Bathroom

I think it's safe to say that we're officially past the last frost date. It's been a hot and muggy week here and it's a cruel reminder that May whizzed by in the blink of an eye. Things have been quiet on the blog front but certainly not in real life. Here's a quick summary of what May provided since the beam went up: playing in the dirt and finally getting some plants into the garden, kitchen layout deliberation, a fun day of outdoor paintball, conference volunteering in Toronto only to discover that commuting to the big city would not be a healthy lifestyle choice, a surprise Mother's Day visit to Ottawa for one of us while the other had a surprise bout of appendicitis and ensuing appendectomy (thank you, gods of unfortunate timing), and a week of recovery from said appendectomy.

Sprinkled around all of that was work in the upstairs bathroom. "Wait a second," you're thinking. "Aren't you folks doing a kitchen renovation?" Indeed. But since the kitchen reno means we've got full access to the stud bare walls and open ceiling, there's no better time to rough in the plumbing for the bathroom upstairs. You'll recall that before the beam came in, we decommissioned the bathroom. After that, we were still left with the temporary vanity, bathtub, tiled and plastered walls, and remnants of the old galvanized supply and vent lines in the walls.

I got started with the interior wall first, partly because I wanted to pull out the medicine cabinet to use downstairs and partly because I wasn't quite ready to bother with the insulation. In a couple of days, I managed to get it from this:

to this without too much difficulty:

We can't figure out why the old supply lines extended straight up past the tee to the vanity. 

This involved removing the vanity and anything else attached to the wall (soap holders, towel bar, mirror), pulling off the tile and the plywood underneath, knocking down the plaster, and removing the lathes. It really shouldn't have taken long but I was trying to salvage as many tiles as possible. We later discovered that the easiest way to do this is to hammer on the plywood beside the tile to loosen the (likely 40+ year old) adhesive. Sometimes the tiles would pop right off and other times all they needed was a little scrape with a putty knife. At the end of the day, we filled three buckets of solid tiles and had about as much broken tile.

This may have been in vain because I have no idea if anyone would go through the effort of cleaning off the old adhesive and grout to re-use the tile. They're also not the prettiest tiles in the world but could look nice if mixed with the right paint colour and design. We'll take them to the Habitat for Humanity Restore and see what they say.

Anyone looking for some Made in England tiles with a nice speckled mustard design?

With the new tile removal method and Garrett getting in on the action, the pace picked up for the exterior walls:

Tile-less wall beside old toilet spot.

Plywood behind the bathtub valve revealed.

A "vapour barrier" found under the plywood.

Garrett starts on the north wall.

Once we got the plywood and laths removed, we filled several garbage bags with insulation from the exterior walls. It was mostly UFFI but there were also pads of rockwool type insulation on the lower parts of the wall extending past the floor into the kitchen and also bits of fiberglass batt here and there.

A key priority was opening up access to the main plumbing stack. Layers of lath had been used to build up the studs on either side of the stack so the wall would be flat.

We also found random bricks stuffed in upper portions of the north wall. Are these supposed to be insulation because they don't seem to have any structural purpose and definitely aren't for aesthetics (since they can't be seen from either side)?

This is how things looked on Monday morning when the plumbers (a father and son team) arrived to take over. In three days of work (well, one full and two half days), they removed the bathtub, the old cast iron drains and the remaining galvanized pipes, installed new ABS drain pipes, and put in some PEX supply lines for our new bathroom layout. But this post is already miles long and the intention was to talk about the deconstruction so I'll leave the new stuff for the next post. Here's a last photo of the blank slate created after the plumber got the tub and old pipes pulled out.

Tabula rasa.