That "Dog" Bathroom gotta go, literally

Finally getting around to posting about the great bathroom remodel. This project didn't actually take as long as we thought it would, but as you can see, it was in desperate need of getting done. When we moved in this nifty little sink was included/attached to our toilet! What a lovely surprise!

That was the first thing to go... we quickly replaced it with the toilet topper and admitted that this bathroom really had no sink in it. The bathroom was remodeled by the first owners--they took out the sink vanity and replaced it with this beautiful hot pink and green tiled dog bathing stall. The tile only goes up about 3 ft--so pretty useless for a normal person (not to mention the showerhead comes out of the bottom). Also, since this was meant to be a half bath, whenever you sit down to use the toilet you have to have one foot inside the shower--joy!
After serving its purpose as our paint/tool cleaning station as well as the "my kids peed their pants shower-off station," Zui began to tackle the project. Okay, turning the time over to Zui...

First I had to turn off the water and electric so when I cut we didn't have more problems. Set the saw to the thickness of the drywall and chopped off the three feet of puke ugly tile on one side, and scraped the tile off the drywall on the other two sides.


As you can guess there was tons of dust already in my lungs, time to put my mask and goggles on. Sometimes I think I can be superman and tuff it out, but it was getting pretty cloudy.

Luckily I was the young men's president in our last ward and became good friends with them, here's Nathan Fetner helping us a ton on this project. After the walls were down and the plumbing exposed we needed to clear the shower bed. There was tons of that pink tile and it was stuck to the mortar. So Nathan and I went to town whacking it with chisel hammers till all the pink tile was gone and we had a 3-4 inch exposed concrete slab sitting on top of the original floor level concrete. That was a surprise and we weren't sure how to get it out. I was afraid that the concrete would not come out even with the rest of the floor.
So we started sawing the slab with a diamond studded blade. We were hoping that maybe we could cut it with lines and use a chisel to hammer out the cement even with the original floor. Both Nathan and I looked like we got into a flour fight by the time we cut only 1 line each.


Unfortunately even with the door closed concrete dust got EVERYWHERE in the house, even managed to climb upstairs somehow.

Here's a picture of our cupboard after Jenn removed the doilies--yeah we had to dust everything.
So after getting frustrated that this cutting idea wasn't working very well, I decided to just take out some steam with a good old fashioned 20 lb sledge hammer.


Yeah, 1 hour later and the mortar was out. Luckily the do it yourselfers who remodeled it originally didn't use a very good bonding adhesive so it spider webbed and cracked without damaging the foundation slab.

After removing all the tile and concrete in our normal trash bin, and a neighbors bin (who's bin we broke because the load was too heavy) the bathroom looked much better already. **C&C of Honolulu replaced the broken wheel for free**


So the next step was tackling the plumbing. I cut the copper pipes with dad's dremel, sanded the cut pipes, fluxed (bond), attached the pipes then soldered the pipes with a $10 dollar blowtorch from City Mill.

Figuring out the size of the pipes, how much pipes, couplings, turn off valves, and all the other stuff was just as much work as doing the project itself. Luckily I had a sales rep at Home Depot who actually knew a thing about plumbing work and helped me get the right hardware I needed for my project. After finishing the copper plumbing I worked on capping the old ABS shower drainage and cementing a new ABS T-coupling for our soon to be sink drain. Once the behind the wall plumbing was done I got our new drywall measured, cut and screwed it into the 2x4s. Then I mudded the joints, let it dry overnight, sanded it all, and textured it with a knockdown texture.


Finally it was time to paint. I started edging the whole bathroom and then went in with the rollers. One more quirky thing about the old bathroom was that the door opened up into the hallway. Since the old shower stall was so large, the door couldn't swing into the bathroom, and instead sat open in the middle of our kitchen hall. I had to ply the door frame off, fill the hinge holes & door jam with wood filler, let it dry then reattach the frame to allow the door to sit on the inside of the bathroom and open inwards again. Little projects all wrapped into one.

We wanted to match the existing floor tile in the bathroom but it was too outdated and we couldn't find any so we had to scrape off the tile on 1/2 the floor as well. After lots of contemplation we decided against going with tile for the bathroom floor and instead went with some premium no-glue roll vinyl instead. Measured it all out and cut it perfectly without having to patch some areas. Here I am cutting around the toilet hole.

Installing drywall around the plumbing was like playing tetris. It was hard to find backer boards to screw the drywall into. But here's what the 1/2 turn valves and the sink drain looks like.

After checking one last time for no leaks, I mudded up the plumbing and installed the new vanity we got from Home Depot. Then reinstalled the toilet with a new wax ring and bolted it down.


Did the finishing touches around the edges with new baseboards cut at 45 degree angles to meet in the corners. And we silicon caulked around the vanity because I know my kids will definitely get water outside of the sink. And I was done with my project. Here's the before & after pics.








Total cost -- a whopping $353. Total time spent--1 week. Learning experience--priceless. Reward --The joy of knowing I did this! -- Zui