Demolition

You want to know what's really awesome? Walking into the basement laundry room and NOT hearing water dripping from the bathroom upstairs.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Why was water dripping you ask? Well, I'll tell you. See that lovely white caulk where there should be grout between the tiles in the photo below? That's where the grout had worn away over time and Jon used caulk to create a quick fix so water wouldn't drip into our basement any more. Because when the grout wears away? Then the water soaks into the wallboard behind the tiles and then drips into the basement once the wallboard is completely saturated. Cool, huh?

Yeah. Not really.

The next thing that happens when you have caulk in your shower where it's not supposed to be is that when you try to clean the walls in the shower, the caulk wants to remove itself from between the tiles. Very annoying. So again, slowly over time, the water began to drip into the basement. 

We decided we were done with water dripping into the basement.

Jon started this project on the evening of Christmas Day. I'm pretty sure he was hoping that he could finish the entire project before he went back to work just after New Year's Day.

Removing the tiles was the easy part and was very, very fun. Demolition is fun. You've all seen Extreme Makeover Home Edition, right? Of course ours was really nothing at all like that but still. It was fun to tear the tiles off of the wall.

Then we all took turns removing the wall board which had been behind the tiles. The good news was that this was a Sunday and our trash day is Monday. All of our first night's work was happily carted away by the garbage man the very next day! This made the mama of the house very happy.

And once the project began we decided we were going all the way and taking everything out. Above you have the entirely empty bathroom. It's kind of like that book, If you Give a Moose a Muffin. 

If you take out the shower and the tub, then you're gonna have to re-do the floor. And if you re-do the floor, you're gonna have to re-do the sink and the vanity. And when you try to remove the toilet, it's gonna break so you'll have to replace that, too. Yeah. It broke. 

So there you have it. Phase one. A totally clean slate to work with. You're going to have to come back tomorrow for the big finish!