One Room Challenge-Week 5-Thankful for the extra week

Welcome Back!  It’s week five of the One Room Challenge!  If your new to my blog and aren’t familiar with the One Room Challenge it’s a bi-annual, six week challenge for a select group of bloggers and a volunteer group of guest participants, hosted by Linda from Callingithome.com. The bloggers redesign one room in a span of six weeks and share their progress in a weekly blog post, culminating with the final reveal on the sixth week.

I cannot believe how much time and effort it takes to demo an 8′ x 8′ bathroom! I still haven’t accomplished anything picture worthy so this week I’m going to talk about the process even more and then maybe finish with a few inspiration pictures to rest the eyes.

Last weekend started with a bang, literally. Friday night I rented a jackhammer. I rented at 6:01pm because the four hour rental period ended after the Home Depot store closed, giving me until Saturday morning at 9am to use the jackhammer. This wasn’t as well planned out as I thought because by the time I got started at almost 7pm I was already worn out from the days activities so I was less than enthusiastic about the job.  Thankfully Beast and I alternated the jackhammering and we got about 1/3 of the tile up by 10pm when we decided we should give it a rest for the neighbors sake.  We thought about starting early on Saturday morning but we had company staying with us from out of town and figured that would be bad hospitality so we just returned the jackhammer at 9am and went back for it that afternoon after the kids activities were finished. 

We had to keep the jackhammer for another 24 hours because we still had to trench out the 4″ concrete slab to accommodate the new drain pipes.  I had to be at a cheer competition all day on Sunday so thankfully Beast finished the job. Jackhammering is not as scary as it sounded. The tool is simple and easy to use. It’s just a little heavy. The tool itself weighs 20 pounds, which is good for straight down jackhammering, like the trench in the picture above because the weight of the tool does all the work.  However, when we removed the floor tile, the jackhammer had to be at a 30-45 degree angle to the floor so the weight of the tool was solely resting on arm power.  I sat on a Homer bucket and rested the tool on my leg for most of the tile removal. This method saved my back and arms from exhaustion.

The plumber was scheduled Monday so we had to have everything prepped and ready for him to put in the new pipes and install the new water lines.  It was a race to the finish. I made two trips to the dump and these Homer buckets made it so much easier to haul all the rubble out of the bathroom. The handles are solid and the buckets hold just enough weight that they’re not too heavy to carry. I absolutely recommend buckets for hauling rubble, and this is not a sponsored post, but the buckets were a sleeper of a tool in this job.I also took out the old pocket door and installed a new wider pocket door over the weekend.  I can’t even remember when that happened  except that it was prior to the plumber arriving on Monday.  The old door was only 24″ and our clawfoot tub wouldn’t even fit through that door, but that’s not why I widened it. The 24″ door was just odd for a bathroom.  It felt like a closet door, almost like you needed to turn sideways to enter the bathroom.  It just felt weird. Then the plumber came Monday and installed all at the drain pipes. Tuesday he ran all the water pipes and installed the faucets for the two sinks and the faucets for the shower and the clawfoot bathtub.  Yahoo!!!  We have working faucets!

On a sidenote…I ordered a shower pan for the shower floor.  I waffled over whether or not to use a shower pan or to build curbs and install a tile shower floor.  I like the look of a tile shower floor but don’t like the maintenance(cleaning) of a tile shower floor. Tile shower floor is more difficult to install and I think the price is about the same as a shower pan, so in the end I decided to use a shower pan.  Well , I ordered a shower pan online and the ETA was set for a week. A week was already pushing the envelope of time because every other aspect of this bathroom is hinged on the shower pan install. Then on the sixth day I got an email stating the shower pan wouldn’t arrive until November 12!  Obviously that won’t work. I cancelled the order and started hunting for a shower pan. No home store stocks a right hand double threshold shower pan. I had to reorder from build.com and the ETA is this Tuesday. I’m hoping it will arrive as scheduled because I can’t do any of the tile until it’s here. We shall see.Would ya look at that! I have junction boxes for my sconces, which look a little oddly placed, but I think its the angle of this picture.

My next task is to close up the walls with drywall and close up the floors with concrete.  Then onward with the fun stuff, putting it all back together.

• tile on the floors and walls
• make the shower curtains(I did receive the fabric from fabric.com).
• install lights
• paint
• install vanity and sinks
• install tub and toilet
• etc., etc., etc.

This gorgeous picture from kaemingkdesign.com was my inspiration for this whole bathroom. At first I couldn’t decide how to handle the shower. I thought I wanted a glass shower enclosure but decided against it for privacy and maintenance(again cleaning).  I also didn’t want a half-wall or anything to close-off the bathroom.  This double shower curtain idea made up my mind for me.  I already love how fabric softens up any space and a ceiling mounted shower curtain is tops!

If you’d like to take a look at my original plans or my progress up to this point and a lot of demolition pictures take a peek at week 1 , week 2 and week 4.

And if you’d like to see the other guest bloggers click the link below.