Master Bath Remodel: Part 1

The master bath in our home isn't particularly functional and is certainly dated.  We haven't messed with it much because we weren't 100% sure what we wanted to do with it.  There's nothing like coming home from a long weekend out of town and finding the ceiling caved in to move a project to the top of the list.

This is what the master looked like when we bought the house:

There were two smallish walk-in closets, but we knocked a wall out of one and turned an extra bedroom on the other side of it into a huge walk-in closet.  The bottom picture shows the biggest problem we have with the room.  The shower is a tiny, elevated death trap that Nel doesn't even use and I think I've been in the tub once, and that was only because I was injured and needed a place to bleed.  We had talked about knocking all of this out and building one big shower, but just hadn't committed entirely.  

Then we went out of town for a few days and came home to find this:

As a homeowner FYI - the water leak was actually caused by the 2nd floor AC unit.  When we left town I turned the temp up on the downstairs unit but didn't mess with the upstairs unit.  With the 1st floor warming up, the 2nd floor unit was working hard for a few days.  Apparently the drain line runs down from the attic way up above the master bath.  The line was clogged to some degree, but not completely.  However, since the 2nd floor unit was running so much while we were gone it caused water to back up the line about 10 feet and overflow at an open connection.  It took us a while to figure this out because we couldn't replicate the leak since we had turned the 1st floor AC down when we got home and the AC isn't located anywhere near this area.  Once we did figure it out I got our plumber to fix the leak and we decided we might as well go ahead and remodel the whole thing.

The first step was to dry everything out.  I called a company that specializes in this sort of thing and they set up seven fans and two dehumidifiers for a few days.  It was LOUD.  We found lots of excuses to get out of the house.

The next step was to demo the area.  I decided to do it myself - ugg!  It always sounds so simple, but houses put up a fight.  

  
When they built the place they had actually bricked in the tub.  The bricks weren't really a problem, but the concrete and mortar were.  That stuff did not want to come out.

It did give me a rare opportunity to utilize my sledgehammer.  Notice the eye protection?  Safety first!

Slowly but surely I beat the concrete into submission, and also revealed quite a bit of water damage under the shower pan.  It was all coming out anyway, so no big deal.  My buddy Barry and my brother Michael helped me get the massive cast iron tub out of the house.  Branelle helped me rip out the tile floor and we were nearly ready to start building.  There was just a single vent line in the way that would have to be re-routed by our plumber, but otherwise everything was ready to go.

I tried to convince Nel that having a stripper pole in the shower would be "sweet" (and a lot cheaper than re-routing it), but she didn't go for it.

To be continued.....