Yeh, bad attempted at pipe pun. Sue me.
I took Friday off work again, this time to tackle the bathroom part of the reno. All we had done up to now was remove the old laminate and the toilet. Today it was to be gutted: vanity and sink removed, which involves cutting the copper pipes, and hacking the vanity all to hell.
It went surprisingly well, although we did run into a hurdle when I went to cut the pipes.
The pipe cutter that we bought wasn’t small enough to full rotate around the pipe to cut it because the pipes were too close to the back of the vanity. It looked like that red one in the picture, except ours was blue. My wife went to Canadian Tire to buy a smaller one, while I searched for our pipe wrench.
Cutting the pipes was a piece of cake, after shutting off the water main of course. :) We then began dismantling the vanity. It turned out that the left side of the vanity, attached to the wall, was actually the wall itself. Cheap. It took us about 10 minutes to remove all the pieces, leaving us with a floor lower than the rest of the floor. It’s a good thing we kept laminate floor scraps from last week. Laying then two-deep was enough to bring it up to the floor height.
The funniest thing of the day had to be when I removed the toilet toll holder. It was old and inset into the wall and my wife wanted it gone. I scored the edges and pried it off, leaving this massive chunk of plaster and carpet(?!) inside the wall. It took a lot of hammering to break it free. I'm not sure why they jammed carpet in behind it and also to the right of it. And, they stuffed plastic underneath it -- as insulation or to stop it from seeping down into the wall as it dried? Very odd.
With the vanity now gone, I attached the pressure-fit shutoff valves to the cut pipes. That went great. No leaks after turning the water back on. The main water shut off tap does seem to now have a very slow leak though.
My wife took some careful measurements of the floor space, taking into account the pipes and the toilet drain hole, and we managed to cover the entire floor with two large pieces of plywood. A couple of dozen floor screws later, and it was installed.
We dry fit some floor tiles and discovered the bathroom door isn’t going to close with tiles on the floor, so we’ll have to remove it and plane the bottom down. We were also quite happy to see that the layout of the tiles could not be better. The toilet drain occupies the space of a single tile, which will make the cutting really easy. As well, the sink water pipes also fit in part of a single tile space. Another easy cut. We planned this layout perfectly. :)
We also, finally, got to move our stove and fridge back into the kitchen. I didn’t mention that we grouted the tiles earlier in the week. It seems we had the presence of mind to buy quit-set grout, that dries in 3 hours.
My wife wants to paint the bathroom tomorrow before we begin laying the tile, so that’s the first thing on our list for tomorrow. We should also be able to install the floor tile. This time, I think we’re going to try and get the cut ones installed at the same time. Once the tile is laid, we really have no choice but to wait until Sunday to grout and install the vanity, if we’re lucky.
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