. Damn You, Bob Vila ............

. A Remodel


Are you like me? Seen too many of those home repair shows and thought to yourself, "Shit, it doesn't look that hard. Bob Vila wears Topsiders without socks on his show...I mean, how hard can the project be if he can be on a construction site with footwear favored by yachting geeks?"

I actually hadn't planned on remodeling the bathroom at this point, but one thing led to another and before I knew it, the bathroom was torn apart. Destroyed. Fucked up beyond all recognition. Anybody who has ever done their own remodel will share my pain. Check it out...


This was the start...I removed the mirror and there was no turning back. Notice the old in-wall cabinets that were there.
Then it was time for the counter to go. What an ugly piece of doo-doo with a light blue sink.
Ripping the marble (?) backboard off was a bitch. I left some good holes in the wall. Chill on the glue homies!

The cabinets took a while to tear apart. Nails everywhere courtesy of the sport carpenter who built them.
Finally, only the plumbing was exposed. We had a nice hole in the wall from a previous plumbing emergency.
This is how it looked after a lot of drywall tape, joint compound, paint, and swearing.

It was evident that there was water damage around the toilet so the floor had to come up.
We used the circular saw to cut manageable grids into the floor so we could tear it up in chunk-size pieces.
Here's the subfloor. The circular saw marks were from some other stiff who couldn't set his blade depth correctly.

Nice decay around the crapper. Had we ignored it, the toilet might've started rocking.
I cut up the subfloor, braced the sewer pipe underneath, and rebuilt the subfloor with perfectly cut pieces. What a bitch!
I used cardboard to create a template for the underlayment; otherwise, I would've killed many trees trying to get it right.

The templatized pieces were dropped into place. Notice the look of approval on the inspector's face. Make that snout.
I made a rookie error here...I let the plywood seam fall along a prime foot traffic area...
So I had to flip the two plywood pieces around and recut the template around the toilet. Poor preplanning=extra work for me!

The piece around the bathtub required some template work and then a jigsaw to cut it into its weird shape.
The old shower fixtures were galvanized steel and was leaking. A plumber replaced all of it because I don't do pipes.
I do, however, do an absolutely bad-ass job with drywall.

Chris wanted a ceiling vent. I told him "your problem!" He got the message and made this his own project.
After a fair amount of fumbling with wires stapled to the beams (we had to cut more holes in the wall to move them), he had his fan.
It's a little hard to tell, but the wall heater and tp holder got polished with Semichrome. They shine like my Staintune pipes now.

This corner shows the evidence of the shower leaking behind the wall. It was rotted, but not enough for a complete tear-down.
The secret to good drywalling is wedging in another piece as close to the hole size as possible. And then praying.
Someone else laid down the vinyl floor. I didn't want to deal with all the glue. The job was mediocre, but not so screwed up I really care.

My first attempt at the baseboard was a failure. It should be more flush against the floor. I tore it out and tried again.
Second attempt at the baseboard...where necessary, I sanded down the wood so it would sit flat on the floor.
Regrouting was a HUGE pain in the ass. The dingy old grout was too hard to remove so I had to carefully lay new white grout on top.

This is our favorite plumber. We called Steve in for the final plumbing work because water scares us.
I almost forgot to note that the walls got a ton of prep work and four coats of paint. Talk about mind-numbingly tedious.
This is it. DONE DONE DONE. Now I only have the rest of the house to do...


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