The size of the powder room is great. It is definitely bigger than our current home's powder room. Initially we were just going to update it with new flooring and a new vanity.
Then we went to an antique mall and found the most awesome piece of furniture that we are going to convert into a vanity for this room. I'm not going to show you the piece just yet. I've got to keep some surprises up my sleeve for a little while.
Anyway, because of the shape of this powder room our newly acquired treasure won't fit into the space.
The main wall in the powder room backs up to the larger family room, and on the other side of this wall, in the part of the powder room to the left of the sink, is this:
Please excuse the really poor quality photo. Once again, it was taken in the evening with only the light of one can light in the ceiling. Anyway, these shelves take up space in the powder room. So Cory and I had to decide if we wanted to leave the shelves in place and simply install a small vanity in the powder room or if we wanted to sacrifice the shelves for the really super cool amazing one-of-a-kind antique piece we both really really really love.
I think you can guess what we decided to do.
I started by removing the pink tiles. Luckily, the wall tiles popped right off with just a tap. But wall tile removal was as far as I got in this room. I soon discovered that the tiles on the counters and the lovely pink sink were set in concrete and there was no way little me was getting them to budge. So from this point on my strong, handsome, burly man husband stepped in and did his thing.
Cory powered through the concrete counters and was even managed to remove the sink without breaking it. He's da man.
Here you can see that the shelves are gone and so is part of the floor. When Cory took out the shelves and the crown molding in the family room he discovered that another family had been occupying this home for some time. A family of squirrels had clearly made themselves comfy as evidenced by the walnuts that tumbled out of the walls. Cory even found a plastic Easter egg that a squirrel brought inside after the humans finished a hunt one year. Silly squirrels.
So Cory had a lot of work to do in this little room. It was a bit more than he bargained for when we started tearing things out of the space. As he began to remove the linoleum flooring he found that it was layered on top of a mosaic tile. Lovely.
It wasn't just any mosaic tile either. It was pink and blue mosaic tile to match the rest of the powder room. Of course it was!
This meant that Cory pounded and chipped his way through layers of linoleum, tile, concrete, and steel mesh in order to get down to the subfloor. I don't think I need to tell you how much work this was.
Slowly but surely he made his way around the room and cleared everything from the space.
It's not easy to see from this photo, but we also learned that the pipes were extremely old and fragile (and one even cracked when Cory touched it) and that the toilet was not properly sealed. The concrete was soaked from water leaking for who knows how long. And the subfloor is so damaged that it needs to be replaced.
So even though demolishing this room was a ton of work, we are very glad we did it. Thank God we exposed a problem that would have gotten much worse had we done nothing. It's moments like this one that make me thankful that we are tackling this project all at once even though we could have kept the powder room intact and just "lived with" the time warp that it was.
Lessons learned from this room: Don't put layers of flooring over top layers of flooring, and perhaps more importantly, check your toilet seals!
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