The A-Team

If you've ever held a cast iron frying pan you know how unbelievably heavy they are.  Now imagine a bathtub made out of cast iron...two of them. The only way to get them out is to smash them to bits. The strength needed to do this is unreal. Superhuman. I took a couple of swings and the sledgehammer just bounced right off like nothing had happened. Like it was laughing and saying, "Is that all you got?!" with a smile on its face. I think I chipped the pink enamel and shook a filling but that's it.

SO- we called in the A-Team this weekend.  Our dear friends the Waleys. They love home improvement stuff just as much as we do and were all fired up to demo just like we used to be!

Mr. Waley KILLED the tubs.  They didn't stand a chance.

The hammering and smashing was so loud that anyone upstairs had to wear earplugs. I have no idea how he did it, even the small pieces I carried out weighed a ton. Tubs will be scaring each other with Mr. Waley stories around campfires for decades.

The pink tub carnage (taken from where the blue bathroom used to be):

The blue tub carnage: 

There was only one hiccup during this demo, which is pretty good considering a lot can go wrong when smashing up bathrooms when you still have the water and power on! Ms. Raley and I were downstairs working when we heard Louis yelling something inaudible and running down the stairs.  As he got closer it became apparent that he was yelling, "BIG PROBLEM, BIG PROBLEM, WE GOT A BIG PROBLEM" over and over and zoomed past us-

Backstory: Louis has a million stellar qualities but he loses his cool quick when faced with a plumbing crisis. One day in the apartment, our toilet started overflowing.  We were both in the bathroom so I turned to him and calmly said, "reach behind the toilet and turn the water off", but he didn't hear me.  In his defense it's pretty impossible to hear someone when you're yelling at the top of your lungs in a high pitched tone, "THE WATER IS GOING UP, IT'S GOING UP, (POO) WATER IS GOING TO OVERFLOW, OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, IT'S COMING!!" After the water rushed onto the floor he'd acquiesced to our fate and quieted down enough to hear my instructions. He had never faced an overflowing toilet and was shocked to find out that a handy valve was located close by in case of that very problem. It was a real learning experience. You're probably wondering why I didn't just reach down and turn the water off myself.  The answer is flailing arms.  I didn't want to get hit and knocked unconscious onto a floor that would soon be covered in an inch of "poo water".  You understand I'm sure.

So- back to the "big problem". Louis runs down the stairs yelling, I ask what's wrong as he whizzes by to the utility room and Mr. Waley descends in time to tell me that a pipe broke upstairs and water is going through the floor into the ceiling above the lower floor bath.  The nice thing about having a crappy house is that you don't bat an eye upon hearing news like this. "Oh" I said.  The ceiling of that downstairs bathroom needs to be replaced anyway so it doesn't matter that much. No one hit the pipe, by the way, it was just old and upset that we had disturbed it by removing fixtures so it cracked.

After some mumbling in the utility room, they finally figured out how to shut off the main water valve and we all went upstairs to check out the damage.

You can barely see the aforementioned angry pipe in this photo (it's to the right of the far right stud) but water ran from there down the rectangle hole where the tub plumbing used to be.  We'd JUST bought a Shop-Vac the day before and it definitely proved its worth. I had rolled my eyes at the purchase thinking we should get a table saw or something more glamorous but lil' Shop-Vac definitely came in handy!

With that drama over and the water off, Louis ran to the Home Depot to buy a plug for the broken pipe and came back with a plumber!  He met the guy while looking around in the valve aisle- you gotta love the country.  Anyway, this guy offered to come take care of it and Louis took him up on it.  He capped off 8 pipes for us and for a lot cheaper that anyone else would have. We may call on him again if we need anything else done.

With the situation taken care of, we left the guys to continue their bathroom fixture demo and we returned to the lower floor where we were tackling the fake wood paneling in the rec room.

If fake wood paneling was a person, it would be ugly on the inside AND the outside.  It's made of the most brittle wood-like material on earth and it shoots daggers of itself at you when you try to bend it.  A truly menacing opponent.  However, it was NO match for Ms. Waley. While I chipped away at it with garden shears, attempting to break away small pieces - she would grab the top and rip down entire sections. It was awe inspiring.

What we soon realized is that the person who put up that faux wood paneling NEVER, EVER wanted anyone to take it down.  They felt SO strongly about the attractiveness of their design choice that they went so far as to nail it to boards behind BEHIND the radiators and then nail the backs of the radiators to it!!

Removing that wood paneling turned into an excavation job and has been, by far, the hardest, most labor intensive part of demo in that house.  Here's a view of a radiator end we moved to see that the wood paneling was wedged all the way down to the cement floor.

We had to find two sets of rusty screws (25years older than we are) and pry each one out of the radiator casing into the paneling and then from the paneling into the 2x3's nailed into the blocks. It was brutal. There was nastiness beyond compare behind that radiator system. It was the stuff of Kafka nightmares.

Here are our favorite finds-

Dinosaur puzzle pieces, a black pen, a red pen cap annnnnnnnnnnnnnd (drumroll please)

One of many NICORETTE wrappers we found, Mmm, fresh mint! Kudos to whoever was trying to quit smoking around kids (assuming the puzzle didn't belong to an adult trying to keep his nicotine deprived hands busy) BUT all the cigarette butts strewn about the property lead me to believe the gum wasn't working.

After a long, long time, we finally got the wall free of it's paneling and were able to move onto carpet removal!

Word of advice- NEVER remove old carpet without a mask on. It's gross. I regret a handful of things in my life and not wearing a mask yesterday during this task is one of them.

We cut it into strips and rolled it out piece by piece.  As we ripped it, clouds of muck flew into the air and a myriad of questionable stains were revealed. Carpet is SO heavy by the way, we had to throw it over our heads to get it into the dumpster and it was pretty tough at times. We might as well have had a dead body in it.

After we removed the padding we saw this-

There's orange and white checkered tile underneath. You just never know what design treasure we'll find next in that house!

We'll probably just lay something over that tile because the wood floors throughout the rest of the basement are an inch higher than that floor anyway. Do you see the curve of dirt on the left side of the picture above?  Here's what we noticed-

There's a dirt trail showing you exactly where the high traffic areas were...because people carried dirt in on their shoes and it filtered through the carpet where it sat for years and years!! AS IF, I needed any more reasons to never have carpet!

After the tubs, paneling and carpet were removed, our amazing friends returned to their clean life.  We are still immensely grateful!

Then we removed the kitchen sink, the remnants of bathroom tile and drywall and cleaned up.

We're still waiting to hear about that new floorplan idea we want.  If we can find a remedy to the staircase issue, we'll be knocking down all the walls upstairs next week!