I’ve been waxing wishful for years on plans to renovate some key areas of my home. The upstairs vanity needs a replacement, the kitchen is vintage 80’s faux-Oak and vinyl, and the downstairs bathroom is a wreck. The downstairs bathroom was the worst of these for me; an area I considered fixable and a terrible eyesore. About four weeks ago Ruth and I were driving past a Lowe’s and decided to pop in and check out the prices of tile. 24 hours later we were tearing the bathroom apart.
There were two key problems with the ground level in my place that required remediation:
- The garage door opened to carpet, which was irreparably damaged due to entry traffic.
- The bathroom furniture and hardware were of extremely low quality and in poor condition.
The problems with the entry way can be seen in the first picture:
The ceramic tile was unfashionable but fine for the front door. But, since the majority of traffic came in from the garage, the lack of tile by the garage door (on the left) was a problem. To correct this I wanted to replace both the tile in the entry way and the carpet next to the garage door with newer, nicer tile.
The bathroom itself looked like everyone’s first apartment from college. Faux Oak veneer and cheap Delta faucets. We’ve captured the original motif of the the bathroom in the following shot:
The easy part of the demolition phase was removing the carpet. Man, that came up like a dream. I would say that at this point my morale was at its highest. “Sure, I’ll have this whole job done in a few hours!” I was probably thinking.
When you’re at Lowe’s you may meet a guy named Jesus. Jesus will want to tell you all kinds of crap about how to deal with re-tiling a surface. The thing about Jesus is that he’s right about 90% of the time. Extrapolate your philosophical message here. In our case, Jesus knew all about putting tile down but not so much about getting it up. Here’s the $30 chiseling device he told me to get to “pop those tiles right off”:
I worked with that device for a couple of hours and ended up covering about two square feet. After hours more of back-breaking, hand-blistering work I was through about 2/3 of the tile. Also, as you can see from the image, I wasn’t wearing a mask to protect my lungs while breathing. This was a big mistake. I had a terrible case of 9/11 lung for the next couple of days that stopped me from running.
I had stopped at this point because the last 1/3 was, by far, the toughest:
Removing the toilet and vanity was a fairly easy process, actually. Toilet replacement is a piece-of-cake and vanities are bolted to the wall by just a few screws. It is a strange sensation to back a SUV into the dump and throw a toilet on the ground. Legalized environmental destruction. It doesn’t feel good.
At this point the bathroom is nearly empty. Jesus’ tile scraper had even less luck getting the vinyl off the floor than the tile. He had even recommended this hallucination-inducing adhesive remover to assist this process. And the first few square feet of vinyl tantalizing peeled off with great ease. But after 30-60 minutes of work on the rest of the bathroom I gave up trying to remove any more.
Also, that inverted pot saucer stopped gases from fouling the house and stopped Ruth from pooping in the hole.
Let me take a minute and sum up the lessons I learned from home demolition:
- Don’t buy Jesus’ scraper. If you really want to get tile up all the way, go rent something with power.
- Wear mask or get 9/11 lung.
- Don’t bother to take off vinyl. Goof off stuff is useless and a waste. With an epoxy-based grout the tile can be put down right on top of vinyl, saving a great deal of time.
- The order for a remodel where painting is involved is: demo, paint, install.
In the next edition, tile installation!