Bathroom Demolition

Ryan and I spent the weekend taking apart the guest bathroom. We're talking serious demo here, i.e. walls came down. It's quite disconcerting to find a toilet and bathtub right out in the open, in the middle of the room at the top of the stairs. It reminds me of my cousin Scott's studio apartment in NYC where the bathtub was literally in the middle of the kitchen (he actually built a hinged countertop on top of the tub to maximize his usable kitchen space!). Here are the early stages of the transformation.

We always wondered why there was a weird bump out in the wall of the bathroom (behind the ladder). Why hadn't they just built the wall two inches over? After pulling down the drywall, we discovered the answer - a beam. Hmmm. Ryan crawled around in the attic and determined that it wasn't structural, so he removed it, exposing the exterior brick coated in what appears to be a black waterproof coating. We considered leaving the beam exposed, but I think it would have looked really out of place. When we rebuild, the wall will be (should be, anyway) nice and flat.

Since we're planning on moving the clawfoot tub to the opposite wall and we have a bit of plumbing to do in the space, we decided to just bite the bullet and move it out now. If anyone's wondering (we definitely were) we're estimating that our tub weighs about 250 pounds without water. Heavy, but not so heavy that the two of us couldn't move it on our own. Our bigger concern was that we might damage the floor boards if the feet were placed on a weak spot... yes, we had visions of our tub falling through to the first floor a la The Money Pit. To make sure that the weight was evenly distributed across the floor rather than just in the four spots where the feet rested, we shifted the tub inch by inch on two long pieces of plywood that we repositioned as we went.

It took us about half an hour to move it out of the bathroom and into the future office/current junk room. I'll be able to clean/refinish/paint it there. And what made me even happier than not having our floor collapse? The realization that the backside of the tub, which will be facing outwards in the new bathroom configuration, has one thin, smooth layer of yellowish paint on it and that the legs aren't painted at all. Thank ye, tub gods! I think a good scrub with some paint stripper and a wire brush should do the trick. The feet are dirty and cobwebby, but see how much definition they have?

All in all, it was a very satisfying few days of work.