Bathroom Redo of our Redo: Demolition Phase

Well, after yesterday's awesome surprise event, we are now back to reality, and our reality is that we still don't have a functioning upstairs bathroom yet!  I wrote a blog about starting the bathroom redo-of our redo here. So now I am showing the photos of Alex's progress; because I was out of town with our camera he took these on his phone while he was working so I could blog about it, how awesome is my husband?!?

Here is the before of the main problem leading to our redo, the tile floor.  You can see that some of the grout had cracked and tiles were becoming loose.  We aren't sure when these were put in the house, (they were there before we moved in) but when we moved in we didn't see any problems and over time it just got worse and worse.

So he got started breaking the tiles out with what he calls "good ol' blue", his breaker bar.  He stuck the edge of the bar into the grout hard enough to pop the first tile out, and then just kept going.

He also had to break out the baseboards, which was nice because they weren't very fancy anyway.  Here is a closer shot of the floor with the baseboards removed.....great purple color, right ?!?!

And here is another shot of the room with most of the tiles removed.

Next Alex removed the vanity: Currently we're still on the fence about getting a new vanity.  I would love one, but is it worth the investment right now?  The backsplash that is there is from the 1st redo we did of our bathroom, we still love the glass tiles. Next, The toilet had to go!

 Alex had to use the sawzall to cut the base bolts (they were stripped pretty bad) in order to get the toilet out. Once they were cut off, he said he had to rock it side to side to break the seal on the wax ring.  So, now the bathroom is empty!  Alex decided to get a new, more substantial toilet.  Our toilet was the "economy" toilet (priced at $25), which is kind of funny to me.  I always thought any toilet would be more expensive than that.  But anyway, Alex picked out a nicer commode, however, the nicer toilet is 5" longer than our old one, and our bathroom isn't very large, so we will have to see if it fits comfortably.  If not, a new "economy toilet" might have to go back in, the nice thing about the economy toilet is that it fits in smaller spaces well, so we will see!

And here is the last photo: Alex measured and cut the new hardy backer board and screwed it in. He found out that the main reason our grout had cracked and the tiles were coming loose was that the floor was uneven underneath.  At some point, "someone" cut a hole in the floor to reach some wiring and where they patched the hole in the floor it had an uneven spot. So Alex corrected it and made sure the hardy backer board was level at each point of installing.

So there it is!  Alex is going to start tiling today!  If you look closely at the top right corner, there is a preview of the tile we chose!  Goodness I can't wait to have a sink and toilet upstairs again soon!!  Getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom is such a pain when you have to go all the way downstairs!