Demolition of My Master Bathroom

So when I found out that I was pregnant, I thought it would be the perfect time to take on my biggest DIY project yet. I know, smart right? Don’t worry, spoiler, everything turned out fine and I did in fact finish the bathroom (barely) before my due date.

Anyways, I had wanted to renovate this bathroom since moving in. It is technically our master bath, but quite literally the smallest bathroom I have ever seen in my life. I had already replace the toilet and the vanity with space saving alternatives before starting this project. Before, you had to actually step over the toilet in order to get into the shower. I have photos from the house listing but it doesn’t quite do it justice.

Okay, so here is where we started. The goal is to take out the fiberglass shower and to hopefully find room to add some inches to shower which will be tiled. All of that pink/purple tile has to go – I hate it and could not find a paint color to match to save my life. Curtain needs to go. The shower is way too small to keep water inside with just a curtain.

First order of business was to take the shower out. I started removing the surrounding drywall to see if there were any screws to make the removal process easier. Surprise, there wasn’t, it was actually nails. I ended up sawing sections of the fiberglass insert out to remove it.

Good new here! See those wood boards at the top? They were spacers so the prefabricated shower would fit. That means, without those, I gained a whole two inches in my new shower!

Next was removing the shower pan. This unfortunately revealed some water damage to the floor. I was not surprise as this is common for the water to collect and drip down from the seams of the fiberglass. The water damage extended outside the shower and near the toilet as well, also not surprising since we had trouble keeping water in while showering.

I pressed on and removed the remaining tile, vanity and toilet. You can see all the weird framing done in this bathroom which I thought was interesting. As a side note, there is another bathroom directly behind this one, hence the extra piping. I decided to keep the drywall that I could in an effort to save money.

With everything removed, it was time to fix the damage boards. Now this house is pretty ancient and you can tell by the diagonal subfloor. My contractor friends let me know that when doing a renovation in old homes like this, they lay plywood on top of the old subfloor. You can see there was a renovation before, as there is plywood where the tile lay.

I opted to keep most of it to save money, but took out a small section where the water damage was. I also replaced a section of the diagonal subfloor and then laid plywood on top.

And that was the whole demolition process! It was quite interesting to see the guts of the house. As a bonus for making it this far, here is my cat sitting on his “throne.”

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