Adventures in Remodeling - Part 2: Man vs. Floor

Day 2: October, 12th, 2009

With the bedroom wall down, it was time to put some plastic up in its place to help contain the dust from the remainder of the bathroom demolition. Dawn was wise enough to cover our bedroom furniture with various items to protect them from terrible terrible plaster dust. Alas, the carpet in the bedroom may have met its match this year - we'll see when it's all said and done (but I'm not holding out much hope).

Today the task was primarily removing the remainder of everything in bathroom except the floor. The lessons learned from the previous day's adventure suggested a bit more caution and a bit less sledge hammer. Suffice it to say no other walls collapsed in the demolition of the remaining three sides.

As you can see from the photos, the dust was abundant as it stuck to the plastic in the very hot and humid room (ewww sweat!). Fortunately the removal of all the rest of the tile and plaster was without event.

Day 3: October 13th, 2009

With all the walls down only the tile floor remained. Plaster, once again my nemesis, prevented me from using the sledge hammer full force lest I wish to redo my entire dining room ceiling.

For this task, my friend Ray stopped over to give me a hand (I called in a favor owed) and together we set about cracking into this floor.

What I was expecting was tile and concrete. What I was not expecting was tile and 2 - 2 ½ inches of concrete interwoven with more razor wire mesh! I was also expecting under the tile and concrete there would be a sub-floor, but no such luck just thicker and thinner areas of concrete.

At first getting the tile out was like pulling teeth...healthy teeth. That is to say it was very slow going and took a lot of energy. But with some luck (and very careful, light sledge hammering) we were able to pull up larger and larger sections of concrete until one 2' x 2' corner of tile and concrete remained.

With a great heave and some very heavy lifting we carried this last section down the stairs and out to the dumpster.My guess is this single section of tile and concrete was easily 120 pounds. It was quite a lump to carry between the two of us. Unfortunately I did not get any photos of the floor's demolition, but Dawn was kind enough to snap a few shots the next morning of a segment of the behemoth in the dumpster and resulting "floor".

Here are a few more pictures:



Next: Part 3 - Come Together (right now...over me)