bathroom demo!

When I left for work on Friday, our bathroom looked like this:
After leaving work Joe & I stopped at Menards and Lowes to compare tile prices & a buy a couple of tools. I also learned that the way our bathroom was put together was somewhat shoddy. Joe told me about the plywood-plastic sheet-particle board sandwich onto which the mosaic tile was GLUED! No thin set, just glue and then the tiles were mortared to the walls, the vanity and the tub! Eek! When we returned home that evening, I found that Joe had removed the vanity, toilet & some floor tile & sub floor.

Saturday morning we took a break from demo and went countertop shopping. We went to Stone Countertop Outlet in Albertville. We looked at pre-cuts of granite, but decided on a beautiful quartz product called Piedrafina. Our counter will be "Bianco". The really cool thing about Piedrafina is that it's similar to Cambria, but it's made up of marble bits. It's about 95% pre-consumer recycled product that would otherwise be thrown away. It's perfect for a bathroom, but not a great choice for a kitchen or laundry since it doesn't stand up to lots of abuse. This was our big splurge item at $450. I'd budgeted $500.

We also made a Menards run, this time with a list of things we needed to buy. Sponges, bucket, paint rollers, paint (mail in rebate!), Misc tools stuff.

We came home and started breaking out tile. And breaking out tile and breaking out more tile. (man, I hate that tile!)

Since we live in a townhouse and have shared walls on 2 sides of our house, we knocked off making tons of noise about 8:00 and watched part of an NCIS marathon. We went to bed with the bathroom looking like this:

Sunday, we got up, ate some waffles (from scratch, thank you very much) and ran to Home Depot (notice, this is the 3rd home improvement store we've visited, (4th trip counting 2 different Menards)). We returned a tile we don't need and purchased a circular saw, which I thought we already owned, but apparently we didn't.

Came home, cut the rest of the upper sub-floor out and discovered bigger problems. The plywood lower sub-floor is only 1/2 inch, it should be at least 5/8 inch. We also discovered that the way the walls were built is weird. Thank goodness I built in $100 into the budget as a safety misc. fund! We'll be replacing the sub-floor. (oh, joy!)

While Joe was figuring out what, exactly, they did when they build our house, I pulled down the shower tiles. These were also glued. Being larger tiles, they came out much more easily and without nearly as much swearing.

After that we ran to Lowes & Home Depot (visits to store 6 & 7) and brought home the tile for the tub/shower. Nothing exciting here, just white subway tile purchased at Depot. I know a lot of people are using subway tiles and it's almost become a cliche, but its pattern reminiscent of our backsplash and I like the classic look.

After dinner, we cut out the drywall around the shower/tub, sucked up all the drywall dust and at 8:00 called it a night.

Here's what will waiting for us (and by "us" I mean Joe, since I'll be at work) Monday morning:

There are more photos on flikr!