The Dreaded Bathroom: Part 2

Oh, the dreaded bathroom.

It’s been a while since we’ve done updates to the house. We’ve been pretty busy building trails, fund raising, and focusing on Slick80 related things.

When we moved here, the bathroom was the worst room in the house. It was a mess. If you need a re-cap, just check out the Before and After section of this blog and you can read all about it.

 

Bathroom: November 2013

 

 

It has remained the worst room in the house.

Since we have lived here, we have cleaned the bathroom quite a bit. All the carpet has been pulled out, the layers of linoleum are gone, the leaking sink has been taken out, and the three sewing machines have been removed, along with a huge list of other things I don’t feel like discussing. If I made a list of the grossest things I’ve had to clean up in my lifetime, this bathroom would be on there more than once.

At some point, Tylor’s grandparents could no longer climb into the claw foot tub. After that, it gradually became a strange storage unit for boxes of clothes, random tools, plumbing, hangers, vacuum parts, and coffee mugs.

A stand up shower was eventually put in the laundry room, which is still what we use now and the current bathroom is still without a functioning tub and no sink, but the toilet works (yay), so I can’t complain.

 

Oh, but I’m going to.

 

The shower we use in the laundry room also leaks. It became another stupid problem that we added to the list of others. Honestly, I can’t keep up. We decided to stop procrastinating on the bathroom so we could actually use it like a bathroom and stop using the leaking shower. The bathroom project is so massive and so daunting that we just keep putting it off. But we can’t anymore. We need to face it and get it over with. I hate this bathroom so much that it actually might be good for my sanity to fix it.

Did I mention the wedges of wood (shims) that have been placed under the toilet to keep it level?

Because of the old sink that leaked for years unnoticed, the other water damage around the claw foot tub, and the fact that a cat box was placed behind the bathtub, we need to rip out the entire floor and put in a new sub floor.

And by cat box, I mean there was no box; just layers of newspaper with layers of kitty litter…with layers of piss and crap.

We empty the bathroom, claw foot tub and all. When we pick up the claw foot tub (holy crap it’s heavy) we notice that it really only has three feet. The other foot didn’t move with the rest of the tub. It just stayed on the floor and then eventually tipped over.

Great.

If you have ever owned a home, you know that most projects end up being way more than you anticipated. When the claw foot tipped over with a little thud, I took that as a warning that we were in for something neither one of us wanted to deal with.

This is going to be a horrendous project. I can feel it.

Tylor and I take hammers and start ripping up the floor. Parts of the floor are so damaged that it doesn’t take much effort. We rip up what we can so we can look at the support beams. I’m not an expert but they weren’t looking so great. They were damp and had white dots, which we think might be mold. The concrete foundation (that we could see) was covered with dried mud.

 

I’m not shocked anymore. I just stare at Tylor and I feel defeated.

 

 

Support beams hold up the floor of the entire house. Damaged support beams mean they will eventually rot away and crumble, eventually taking the floor in the process. What good is a new sub floor when the beams might not even support it years later? Why even tile the floor? Why make this a functioning bathroom if it’s just going to crumble later?

Replacing the support beams means so much more than simply laying down some plywood and tile. The beams go to other areas of the house. To replace them, we would have to take down walls and rip up more flooring. It is more than what we signed up for and it is more than what we are qualified to do.

We stare at the hole in the floor and brainstorm.

We know that something needs to happen to this floor. Not only is it falling apart, it’s just not sanitary. We have a huge roll of black plastic lining and we cut two huge sections and staple it on the old bathroom floor. We bring in two pieces of the new plywood and lay them over the lining. We don’t have a for sure plan yet and maybe this can buy us time. We also don’t want to ruin our new sub floor by simply placing it on top of the old (gross) floor. The only section we don’t lay new plywood on is the section that contains the sink and toilet because we’re not really sure what we’re doing to this bathroom yet so we don’t want to start cutting out those sections.

I paint the entire floor (old and new) with mold and mildew proof paint.

 

 

It’s already starting to look better and we no longer have to tip-toe around the dodgy sections.

I move our stuff back into the bathroom (and add new stuff), reorganize and try to create a space that is no longer gloomy and grim but hopefully more pleasant and cleaner. Nobody wants to feel dirtier coming out of the bathroom.

The bathtub stands on three legs and functions as a counter instead of tub. I found a really cool metal storage unit in our scrap yard, cleaned it and dragged it in. There is one shelf completely rusted through, but it still functions as a storage unit for our nick knacks. Some how the random items I put in here contain the color orange. It was not done on purpose but it works. An old lamp from the house was placed in there and some how looks better in this new environment. I’m pretty sure Urban Outfitters is going to start selling grandma lamps and it will become the trendy thing to buy. We have acquired a pile of old shavers, which I think are pretty cool, and hung them on the wall. The bathroom slowly transformed.

 

 

 

It may not be perfect but holy crap it is a million times better than what it was.

I’m not sure what we’ll do next or if this will just be our bathroom for a while. I’d rather contemplate it in this bathroom than in the previous version.