After spending what seemed like the entire summer with myself and our two little boys perpetually ill, my friend Sherri and I decided that our illnesses were probably being caused by the nasty mold inhabiting our main bathroom. The plan was that Sherri and I were going to tear up the floor and then we would just live on the subfloor while we made plans and saved some money so that we could have the new bathroom that we wanted.
The morning we were supposed to demo the floor my friend arrived at our house before I got there, she decided to get started without me. When I walked in the door she met me with a grim look on her face.
"It's not good." was all she kept saying. I walked in the room and almost died for two reasons, one because it really was bad, and two because it smelled like something had died in the bathroom. We had water under the first layer of floor (yes I said first-in the end there was one layer of linoleum with an additional subfloor, and then two more layers of linoleum.) and the water was spread across the entire floor. There was saturation from the tub to the vanity and almost to the door.
A decision was made immeditally to completely move ahead with the renovation, it was clear at this point that we were not going to be able to "just live with it" for a few months. Once the moldy floor was exposed it needed to be taken care of. As you can see in the photos above, this was a problem the previous owners attempted to deal with (unsuccessfully) and that there was serious rot through the floor.
It is funny to me that I was most concerned with the area that I knew was moldy behind the tub, as you can see there is mold but that was nothing compared with the mess on the floor.
My friend Sherri and I got through almost the entire demo in a few hours, the only thing we had not managed was the removal of the tub and the rotten parts of the subfloor. Tony and Kev handled most of those types of things.
The just when we thought we had a handle on how bad things were, Sherri and I headed to Lowe's to get the materials with my friend Robin and a few of the children. As we were checking out, I get a text from Kev that simply states "It just got worse." The only thing I could think at that moment was HOW?
Well, this is how. Sherri and I had identified damage in several locations in the bathroom, but while we were gone Kev and Tony removed the trim and the wall started squishing out water. Gross. One of the walls was completely saturated and disgusting.
These are the pictures Kev took with his phone. As you can see in the photo above, there was considerable water damage that was masked by the drywall in our hall closet.
Awesome.
Tony pulled the thing down to the studs and removed all of the rotten wood he could, then he called in some of our other good friends the Lillroses for some advice on how to proceed.
In the end the decision was made to remove all of the rotten wood and to reinforce and then rebuld the bottom portion of the wall.
Sherri keeps snickering and telling me "Welcome to home renovations." for some reason this is not comforting to me in the least. Haha. For the time being, we are making great progress, but this is also our only shower/tub. Thankfully we have a second half-bath or we would be totally in gui right now.
I think it is going to be a long weekend.
