A month later and finally some progress!

It's been a little over a month and we're finally making progress, thanks to my dad! We got all the drywall out and my dad was excited to come up and help (aka pretty much do it all) with building the shower pan and hanging the hardiebacker. Plus, he has a truck, which we do not, and we were super grateful to have his help and expertise.

Apparently my dad spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos on how to build a shower pan, and we got right to work.

In three days we've gone from this:

To this:

Doesn't look like much, does it? We had to add some pieces to build up the shower pan area and give something to attach the liner to, frame a recess for a shelf, and raise the height of the shower head, and install a new valve.  We also laid another sheet of plywood on top of the old one to add stability since there was some water damage.

The problem with an older house like this is that the pipes are cast iron, and replacing the drain was not easy.  Apparently back in the day they sealed the drain with lead and in order to get the old drain off we had to literally chisel out the lead.

My dad found this product called the pre-pitch kit that makes it fairly easy to get the correct pitch to the shower pan. He thought Home Depot carried it in the store, but they only sold it online, and we needed it ASAP.  Thankfully, Amazon carries it and I was able to get it in two days. 

So this is where we're at.  We have the first layer of cement poured and it has to cure for 24 hours. 

Tomorrow we'll attach the liner and pour the rest, and do the curb. He bought another kit called Kirb-Perfect that should hopefully make forming the curb pretty easy.  I honestly had no idea it would be so difficult to do this, but I can't wait to see the finished project!

Demolition is done! (mostly)

We got most of the demolition done today, including the floor pan. Yay! I was nervous as to what we would find once the floor pan was out, and while the subfloor wasn't as bad as I was expecting, the surrounding studs are rotted and now we're looking at quite an additional amount of work.

Before and after!  

Can't say I'm too surprised, but there was no type of moisture barrier underneath. We found some tar paper behind the drywall when we were taking off the sides of the shower, and I thought maybe it would be underneath the floor pan, but nope. It looks like they had metal around the sides of the floor pan, and that was completely rusted away and just crumbled in our hands.

Finding the rotted studs was a bummer.  We also found some mold, which I was totally expecting.  Now we're going to have to rip out two of the walls to replace the rotted studs and subfloor.  These walls are shared with a hall closet and the main bathroom, so it's going to be pretty interesting for awhile.

So for now, this is where we're at.  I've sprayed bleach water on the moldy areas, and we're not really using this bathroom at all for now, to limit exposure until we can get everything ripped out and thrown away.  

We did find this old linoleum underneath the current floor tile.  It's a good thing we were already planning on replacing the flooring in this bathroom, because if not we'd have to now.

Demolition has begun!

I will admit, I've never really demolished anything before.  So I did some research and found a video on YouTube showing how to basically cut the drywall from around the shower and just pry it off in large pieces, saving you the hassle of having to bust all the tile from the wall.  Sounds, fairly straightforward, right?

Not this house! The video showed a much newer tiled shower without the 1950's chicken wire and cement mix.  So tile bashing it would be!

This is what we're dealing with.  Cement, chicken wire, and tile attached to drywall. Good times!  It was about as difficult as I was expecting, however, the chicken wire is quite simply, a massive pain in the butt.  We blasted some David Bowie, and after about an hour of banging away with a sledgehammer, we were left with a pile of rubble along with a fine coating of dust everywhere, including inside the medicine cabinet, which was closed.

It's been a few days, we couldn't totally fill up the trash can, and I didn't want to go to the hassle or expense of renting a dumpster, so we're hoping to get the rest of the rubble out this weekend.  We still have the floor pan to get out, and that I have a feeling, will be tricky.

We've found at least one leak so far, and will need to replace the plumbing from the shower valve up to the shower head because it is beyond ancient and it's definitely been leaking.  Most likely, after ripping the floor pan out, all of the plumbing will be redone, but we'll see.

I'm planning on getting more done this weekend.  I want to tile up to the ceiling, so we need to take down more of the drywall, and I'm really anxious to get the floor pan out.  We'll see!