The thought of doing the demo ourselves seemed fun at first. Destroying all the tile and drywall, sort of our own “Rage Room” except it’s our own house and we need to clean it up afterwards, so if you’re ever in the position to demo yourself, keep that in mind and weigh your pros and cons.
The physical act of demoing the bathroom was fun for the first 10-20 minutes. Then your arm starts hurting, you can’t breathe from the dust, and in our case – we found some hidden termite damage to top it off (undisclosed by the previous owners which is ILLEGAL in the state of Maryland by the way). Personally, I mentally prepared myself for the worst case scenario of having to completely replace the joists under the subfloors but we will get to that later 🙂
What Was The Damage?
When we started taking apart the area of the shower where the trim popped off, we found some pretty shocking termite holes in one of the 2×4’s. We made our way to the floor tiles and found some more water damage and termite holes and tunnels. When we had one of the contractors come and peek at our shower before the demo, he said that the way they did the railing was completely wrong and it was bound to have water leaking issues eventually. Good news I guess? It was definitely soaked at the top and the curb of the walk-in shower. The more we removed the tile and concrete, the more we noticed how wrongly waterproofed the shower construction was. The nails in the wood holding the shower sheetrock was literally rusted and it was a nightmare to rip out. The membrane was literally NAILED into the 2×4 curb and NOT sealed.
As we tore out the tiles, concrete (which was literally 5 inches thick) and old wood structure, we saw how damaged the subfloor was and that needed to be replaced ASAP. We ripped the damaged subfloor out, replaced it with new and kept the dry subfloor intact. We’ll need to sand it all down for a leveled base for the Schluter System Ditra we plan to install later.
Now, we unfortunately had to decorate our tiny back patio with a large tarp topped with concrete, rotted wood, nails and tiles. Please understand, we live in a small house in the city with a small sedan. Usually, the city has bulk construction pick-up BUT we were in the heat of the pandemic and pretty much everything was shut down – no recycle pickup, sometimes no trash pickup. Thankfully my dad owns a huge truck and was nice enough to come help us load it all and take it to the dump. I did not get pictures of this embarrassing display to save you from cringing at the thought.
Peep our Instagram for updates on our progress!
