Upstairs Bathrooms (2) Demolition

Bodybuilders know that before you can build up, you got to tear down. In this case, that meant lots of work with crowbars and hammers and virile young things that are driven to prove their manliness through athletic pursuits.

Which is a darned good thing, because those of us in the “over 50” group simply didn’t have the stamina required to rip a solidly built house apart.

Again, the kids (and their friends) came to the rescue by ripping the house apart with a vengeance.

Some things were much easier than anticipated – such as the huge cast-iron bathtub in the upstairs hall bath. At first, we expected that it would have to be removed in the time-honored way – specifically, beat to pieces with sledge hammers and then carried out in buckets.

We were surprised, though, and came by one afternoon to find that the demo crew had figured out how to take it loose, turn it sideways and slide it out in the hall – in one piece!

That still left the problem of getting it down the stairs and out of the house, but a throw rug solved that, making a slide across the kitchen floor and out the side door a feasible project.

No sooner had it been pushed to the curb than someone stopped wanting to know if they could have it.

The kids even helped load it – are they great, or what??

The tile shower walls, on the other hand, were much less cooperative. Being made of about an inch and a half of concrete troweled onto wire mesh that was nailed onto the stud framing by some OCD crazed carpenter who insisted on nails every 1.4 inches, they did not give it up nearly so easily. In fact, we were beginning to wonder if Avocado tile might make a comeback sometime soon and whether we should just wait on that when a discovery was made – take the back wall off the shower and beat it from the back side with a very large sledge hammer and eventually it will turn loose.

Wait -- wasn't it a reluctance to open the wall in back of a shower that started all of this?