Bye Bye Yucky Bathroom - This Studs For You.

The time has come for my bathroom to get a facelift; Joan Rivers style.
Long ago, I mentioned this post about my bathroom's pink tiles.  I dreamed of keeping my lovely retro pink floor tiles and ditching the floral wallpaper and the plastic red wine colored wall tiles for an updated, ultra cool, but not too modern look.  Well my friends, that day has finally come.  I could no longer handle going into the bathroom with the tiny vacuum cleaner and having random tiles pop off the walls if I got too close and I was so-over the buckling tiles above the tub faucet and having the plaster beneath crumble into the tub while I was trying to shower.  It was just plain embarrassing.
So on Saturday Nov. 19th, it was Go Time.  I spent the day with a putty knife in hand and went to town popping off tiles left and right.  They came down without too much of a fuss, but what was lurking underneath was another story.  The dreaded M word.  That's right.  Mold showed its ugly face and it was not pretty.  Between the old glue that held the tiles on and the mold growing under most tiles in the shower area, it reeked in there.  This was going to be a bigger project than suspected.

View 1 before renovation (notice missing tiles starting right by shower curtain?

View 2 before renovation.

This picture doesn't do it justice, but can you see the buckling tile above the faucet?

Poppin' tiles in the shower,

A lot of tile gone -- Goldish-yellow stuff: Glue.  Black stuff: Mold.

To make a long story short, the day went by with the rest of the tiles coming off and getting a good jump on getting the glue scrapped off.  The plan from the beginning was to ditch the tiles and wall paper and put a shower surround in and put up white Wayne's Coating, or White Hardboard Wall Panel as it's also called, where the tile outside the shower used to be.  I thought the floor was cute so I was going to keep that and the vintage, yet still cute, medicine cabinet and light fixtures.  The vanity and sink were also going to hit the curb.
The week went along just fine.  The walls in the shower were going to come out only halfway (where the shower surround was going to go) and we were going to start from basically scratch and put up new drywall (the current walls are plaster since the house was built in 1950).  The walls outside the shower were going to stay as is with the exception of the wallpaper coming off.  We didn't really want to go through the trouble of re-doing all of the walls unless necessary.  And as long as I got most of the yucky glue off, we were good to go because the White Hardboard was going to cover that up anyway.  So, with the help of my brother who was off work for a couple days, the three walls in the shower came off halfway.  Again though, mold lurked behind the walls onto the two by fours.  Obviously, these plastic tiles had not been sealed well for a long time.

Somewhere in the tile/glue/wall removal process I was faced with the sad reality that the Pretty Pink Tiles were going to have to go *insert sad face*.  The toilet had obviously had a leak in the past and the floor beneath it wasn't fixed properly.  Therefore, the tiles were loose practically all around the toilet and would need to come out in order for the floor to be fixed anyway.  I knew before that a few tiles were loose but I figured it was a quick fix.  I had no idea that once the few loose ones were out, the large group of tiles surrounding them would have a domino effect.  So, instead of hitting the clubs the night before Thanksgiving, I hit the crowbar and got the floor tiles out in record time.  Well, record time for me anyway, since I have never taken out Tiny Pink Tiles from a bathroom floor before.

Fast forward to Saturday, November 26th.  Somewhere between smashing up floor tiles and Black Friday shopping, my mind was changed and I was going to re-tile the shower instead of putting in a fiberglass surround.  Don't ask why, just go with it.  Let me side-track for a second...I know I haven't mentioned who "we" are in this whole bathroom renovating process, so I will give them shout outs here:  Ladies and Gentelman, let's give it up for the Main Contributors of the Wright Bathroom Renovation 2011.....*insert pump up music*...The Father of the Home Owner, Mr. John Wright...and the brother of the Homeowner, Mr. Jeffrey Wrgiht...and of course a Bathroom Remodel wouldn't be complete with the help of Mom herself, Mrs. Kimberly Wright.  And let's not forget about the woman not always present, but was on major clean up crew today...the Sister-in-law, Mrs. Ashley Wright.  And of course last but not least, the homeowner herself, Ms. Leiann Wright *insert crowd screams and more pump up music*.

Ok, where was I?  Oh yeah, Saturday.  I rented a wallpaper steamer at a local rental place and my mom came over and we went to town taking down that gorgeous wallpaper.  I really wanted to name the title of this post "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", but I didn't.  My mom and I worked for about 6 hours removing wallpaper.  We came across hiccup after hiccup with a few choice words along the way.  

Wallpaper Steamer

Mom so happy she came to help!

Gross walls underneath wallpaper.

We highly recommended to my dad that all the walls come down and we start fresh with new drywall.  That went over like a lead balloon.  Or did it?  After my dad decided to join us in the fun and realized first hand how much a pain in the behind "repairing" the upper part of the walls (where new paint was going to go) was going to be, he finally agreed that all walls needed to go.  So to commemorate 6 wasted hours of peeling wallpaper, we stuck a hammer through the wall so there was no turning back--these walls were coming down!

Crowbars up!

Stud Muffin.

After about three hours of demo work Saturday, approx. 8 hours on Sunday, and 7+ barrels of debris later, all of the walls were naked and pretty much ready for drywall!  A friend of mine is going to come in and do that for me, but not before some wiring and a much needed fan is installed.  There is still a lot to do, but after only a week and a day, I feel like she's lookin' pretty beautiful--studs and all!

Debris 1

5 more barrels of debris

Stripped to bare bones!  What a sight!

Ash on cleanup--no, she isn't germ paranoid, just protecting her lungs from the mounds of dust floating through the air!

I have to also note that as all of this work is going on in the upstairs bathroom, my brother has been working his butt off in the basement to try to make that bathroom more livable for us since we will have to use that one for awhile while the main one is under construction.  It's lookin' pretty good from what it was a couple weeks ago!