One Room Challenge Week 2: Bathroom Demolition!

Welcome to week 2 of the One Room Challenge. Time to tear out all of the ugly tile and cabinets! The room is just a shell of itself now.

My only regret is that I didn’t get to do any of the demolition myself. Smashing a few of those brown tiles would have been fun. But having other people do it was luxury, because I’m sure it’s tiring work that gets old fast.

If you’ve just arrived at DIY in PDX via the ORC blog, welcome! I’m Rachel, and I blog about everything DIY, from fixing up my old house, to making accessories and decor, to growing plants and cooking. For the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge, I’m sharing the gut renovation of the most-used bathroom in my house.

Before we started, our contractor tested for lead and asbestos. I didn’t know this, but old plaster can contain asbestos. Bolding this just in case it can inform somebody else, because I might have done some things differently in my house if I knew about that risk. Luckily, ours didn’t have any. But our contractor was still extra careful with containment and cleanup during demolition. That industrial fan in the window was to blow any dust out, and that shop-vac on the floor had HEPA filters. You have to take this stuff seriously, especially when you have a baby in the house!

Bye, wall tile!

Last week, when I showed you guys pictures of the bathroom before demo, I didn’t get into the details of our plans for the bathroom. But other than the toilet, the only thing we’re keeping is the layout. I found this old photo from the real estate listing that shows the layout of the bathroom better than my photos.

We thought about putting the shower/tub parallel to the window wall and tiling around the window, but then you run into issues with making sure the window is watertight, and potentially having to do expensive plumbing re-routing. There just weren’t really any other layouts that made sense for this bathroom.

There were a couple of surprising things about demolition, but one was how much bigger and more square the room looked! At 7-feet wide by 8-feet long, it is nearly square, but it didn’t feel like it before. Without the bulky cabinets and extra wall, it felt really spacious.

We also learned some really useful stuff during demo. This is my first renovation, but I hear that there are always surprises. We found our first one when the wall the sink was on was stripped down to the studs.

I didn’t get a very good picture of the situation, but you see where the tile ends, at the edge of the vanity? The wall actually juts out there. We were hoping we could get rid of that bump-out, but multiple contractors thought it was probably there to cover the plumbing stack from the upstairs bathroom. So we assumed we would be stuck with it.

We were ordering the vanity before we got started on the bathroom, so it would be here and ready to go when we needed it. With the bumped-out area of the wall being 60-inches long, having a standard-sized 60-inch vanity against it made sense. We considered a shorter one, 40 or 50 inches long, but then not centering it against the bump-out would look weird, and centering it meant we’d be left with empty spaces at either end that might look weird, and be pretty useless. We ended up ordering a 60-inch vanity that sat in our garage for months.

Here’s the wall behind the sink, though. All of the plumbing is behind the bump-out. The real reason for it is actually all the way to the right. That metal duct there was a surprise. It supplies the vents upstairs. So we could have shortened the bumped-out wall on the left side, and had a shorter vanity. But for reasons I’ll get to in a few weeks, I’m glad we didn’t.

That bathtub is being replaced, too. It has a really straight back wall, making it pretty uncomfortable for baths. My husband is a bath-lover, so a good bathing tub is a must.

If you’re wondering what renovation is like with a baby in the house, so was I. Juniper takes two naps a day, and I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to nap with all of the noise in the house. And I’ll be honest, this week was a challenge in that respect! Turning her white noise machine up helped, but her naps were definitely shorter than usual. It wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be, though.

Now that this room is totally torn up, it’s time to build it back up. Next week the plumbers and electricians are coming to do the rough in. (If you’re like me, and don’t quite know what that means, it means that they’re adding the parts that will go behind the drywall and/or tile.)

Everything has gone smoothly so far, so fingers crossed that there are no more surprises!