Bathroom Demo and Wall Rebuild

Just because we haven’t updated this blog since we posted about moving in, doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy! Promise! Over the next few posts I’ll summarize what we’ve been up to over the past 11 months (wow, it’s been that long already!?!)

So, as we mentioned here, the previous tub/shower in the upstairs main bathroom had leaked, and when we tore up the carpet we found mold on the subfloor and wall in the back bedroom that borders the bathroom.

We had originally planned to just cut out the bad part of the drywall to replace it.

view from bedroom

view from bathroom

After a little exploration, we saw that the wall was built on top of the subfloor.

Which meant that we couldn’t take out the floor without taking out at least the bottom part of the structure. Since we were going to tear down at least part of the wall, that got us started on completely demolishing the rest of the bathroom. (This is the bathroom where the tub and shower were already torn out when we bought the house.)

So, Chad then cut the studs and removed the lower wall plate, and removed the sheet of bad floor.

…And replaced the floor.

During this whole process, however, we waffled on whether or not we should have torn down the entire wall, instead of just planning to somehow rebuild the bottom of the structure and replace the small section of drywall. But then we decided we never do things half-way, so we might as well take the whole wall down!

Our “open concept” bathroom/bedroom:

An additional (we hope!) of rebuilding the shower wall completely is that Chad could build in the structure for shampoo/soap niches, or cubbies as we’ve been calling them.