Big house news: We’re finally doing the big bathroom remodel I’ve referred to a few times (here, for instance). We’re doing the whole thing on our own and will give you the nitty gritty as it happens. Perhaps most importantly, my Pinteresting is finally going toward something other than just massive amounts of time spent on the site (check out all my fun bathroom finds here).

Before I tell you what we’ve been up to, I suppose it’s fair to tell you what we have (and, in some cases, had) planned. So here goes nothing:

• Remove sink cabinet and replace with pretty piece of furniture.
• Add vessel sink and single-hole faucet.
• Tile shower/tub area
• Tile floor
• Hang beadboard on bottom half of the walls
• Remove wall paper and paint top half of the walls
• Remove doors on linen closet and paint to look like built-in shelves
• Install sconces in vanity area
• Add floor vent
• Replace tub/shower fixtures
• Hang new mirror for vanity
• Hang curtain(s) in window

Yeah, it’s kind of a lot and our first real, full-blown renovation.

We’ll take you through piece by piece as we put each in — and have our fingers crossed it all looks as good together in real life as it does in our heads. But first, a before picture.

Lovely, huh? That bright yellow wall paper covered in blackberries, strawberries, and their names in French didn’t exactly melt our hearts. Nor did the tile-look-a-like linoleum. Nor did all the glossy white paint and the fake tile on the walls. So that’s what we had and what we were set on getting rid of.

Now, the fun part, or what looks fun on HGTV, demo. Day 1 demo began with high hopes and excitement. We would get everything out of there in a day, maybe even get the cement board hung we thought. Ha.

First to go were the huge cabinets above the shower and all the random towel racks and mirrors around the room.

You know how much the previous owners loved nails, well that love definitely showed up in the bathroom, as evidenced here with the seven nails used just to attach a small connector piece of wood that was not load bearing.

Next to come down was the shower surround. I have no idea what this stuff was. It was this thin layer of some sort of laminate that was held up by metal bars (same material was used on the vanity’s counter top). It was gorgeous, let me tell you. It came down easily, and to our surprise, there wasn’t a drop of water damage. Might have been ugly, but it did its job.

Here’s where our first major discovery occurred. We have solid wood walls. Crazy. Good, but crazy. The walls are massive pine planks that are about 10 inches wide and at least an inch thick. Puff and puff, but no little piggy will blow this house down.

Next, Ed removed the light fixture and medicine cabinet. Both pretty ugly hideous.

While he worked on the fixtures, I started pulling down the wall paper. Only to find more wall paper. I knew I didn’t want to paint over, so I started trying to pull off what I thought was drywall of some sort. Turns out, it was this horrible, horrible 60+-year-old fiberboard that was nailed every 3 to 6 inches and held up at the seams by these metal strips.

I started removing the metal strips because I knew they would make ugly seams when painted over. And here began our slow descent into madness. To remove these metal strips, we had to pretty severely damage the “drywall,” which is how we learned we had fiberboard instead of drywall and wouldn’t be able to paint over it and get an even, pretty paint job.

After much debate, we decided we would remove the fiberboard on the top half of the wall and replace it will drywall. Sounds easy enough, right?

Well, after 3 hours of prying that stuff off the wall (in 3- to 6-inch pieces no less), we still couldn’t all of get those stupid metal seams out. We realized we would have to remove the fiberboard on the bottom half of the wall as well. Basically, we had to go down to the studs (or in our case the walls). So we did. We pried, and we pried, and we pried long into the night.

At the end of Day 1, we had removed most of the fiberboard and molding and were left with this.

A bazillion pieces of fiberboard everywhere and a few stray pieces of molding (like the one you see in the bottom left of the above picture), as well as the sink cabinet, toilet, and gas wall heater. Oh and all the flooring. Basically, Day 1 of demo consisted solely of prying fiberboard off the walls. It. Was. Awful. We cleaned up and then crashed in the bed around midnight.

The next day, my dad drove over for early Thanksgiving, and we visited with him most of the day. He graciously offered to stay the night and help us finish demo. That afternoon/evening we finally finished demo. We removed the flooring — two layers of linoleum on top of ———- wait for it ————————————– a layer of fiberboard. Agh!! The three of us took turns prying it up, with my dad doing most of the work, and finally got it up.

Then we moved on to the sink cabinet. Originally, I thought we’d detach it from the wall and keep it all in one piece. I had big plans for it becoming a potting bench. We quickly realized it was custom built for the space and would have to be taken apart piece by piece. So we set to work on it by first prying off the top, then the interior shelves, then the support structures and sides, and finally the base. Who knows if we’ll ever figure out how to put it back together, but we saved those pieces just in case.

Of course, we found more fiberboard behind the sink cabinet, so we chipped it off.

We decided to leave the final layer of flooring (under two layers of linoleum and one layer of fiberboard) because we didn’t have a very good reason to try to pry it up off the subfloor. We made a similar decision after finding multiple layers of flooring in the den last year.

At the end of Day 2 and the end of demo, we had this: exposed walls, exposed floors, and completely empty room.

If you liked this post, then might we suggest:

Bathroom by the Numbers

Bathroom How-To: Hanging Cement Board

Subway in the Shower

Not-So-Traditional Beadboard Installation, Plus Color on the Walls

Rebuilding the Walls and the Floor

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