Houselopnik, bathroom is finally "done enough"

"Pixel" (Improbcat)
08/26/2017 at 22:09 • Filed to: None

Ten months after a puddle on the floor turned into a horrible discovery, I have finally “finished” my bathroom remodel. Still have some detail things to do (spacers to lift radiator, fill some trim nail holes), but i am super happy with how it came out.

For those who don’t remember the start of this 10 months ago (and I don’t blame you), I began with this:

Color choices by my now-ex girlfriend

I found a puddle on the floor where their shouldn’t have been, and chasing the moisture did this before I found the source (a leaking tub faucet that was wicking behind the tiles and into the wall):

And in the process discovered the 6"x 6" main beam for the house looked like this:

and yes, ever single wall stud is rotted and not actually supporting anything. The plaster & lathe was holding the wall up in this area

To fix it I had to sledgehammer out the tub, and rip the tile off half the walls. So at that point I just stripped the rest of the room (the destruction ended up going even further as more unrelated issues were discovered).

Then the rotted wood was cut away or stabilized, and the area was rebuild using pressure treated wood. I had to use my car jack to bring two floor joists up to the same level as the rest. I also cut off the bottoms of the rotted wall studs and literally built them back down to the repaired main sill beam.

I ended up having to pull the plaster down on the entire lower half of the room and replace it with blueboard, as well as build new walls for the shower as it was a different width from the 1930s tub that was in here. The medicine cabinet and the wall around it was replaced as it turns out both the cabinet and the lights were just sort of floating free in the wall, secured to nothing but the old plaster & lathe.

The project took forever, as every step ended up being harder than it needed to. From being sold the wrong mortar to mount the shower pan (turns out air-dry doesn’t work if it is sealed under a pan, and was still soft when I pried up the pan and scraped it out 3 weeks after installing it), to discovering matching flat blueboard to plaster wavy enough to make you seasick is a massive pain. But in the end I have a really nice bathroom with a massive shower instead of a cramped tub.