Art Deco Bathroom Remodel- Week 2

I can’t believe it has been a week already. Lots has happened.

I am participating in the One Room challenge for the next 8 weeks. This is week 2 of my Art Deco Bathroom renovation. To see where it all started and the plan for it see THIS post.

I have spent the last week doing demo.

When we demoed the girls room last year to redo it, we knew it was going to be a chore. And it was. Lathe and plaster is no joke. It is messy, and time consuming to remove. Lots of people have asked why even remove it? Can’t you just paint over it?

This is what lathe and plaster looks like on the backside. You can see here they put a metal mesh over, then cement, then the tile was over that….

The answer is yes. Yes you can paint over lathe and plaster which is what we actually did in our last home. We were able to do this because the plaster was in good enough shape. It needed minimal repairs from cracking, and the home didn’t have any insulation issues that needed addressed.

This home is a different beast entirely. Our home is made of cinderblocks and stucco. The end. The interior walls have lathe and plaster, but the exterior walls are just cinderblock and stucco. There is no insulation on any of our exterior walls. On the inside of those exterior walls, they wallpapered right onto the cinderblock, and then painted that. ( or in our case several layers of wallpaper and paint over the years) This might be a normal building method for this style, but we live in Idaho. Our house is FREEZING like all the time. Pair that with some old wooden windows, and the heating bill is crazy.

This photo kinda shows the layers behind the tile. The metal, then board, then tile. The lathe and plaster behind it is the inside of another closet. The lathe and plaster in our home is only on the interior walls.

So when we started remodeling this house we knew we needed to do it right, from the beginning. There would be no short cuts, or quick fixes. Every room we tackled was going to be a big project. Some might call us crazy, but we are up for the challenge, and I find it thrilling that we get to bring this old house back to life.

So yes. This bathroom remodel has been going VERY slow this week. In addition to removing lathe and plaster, I have tile I was removing. This tile is old, and thick, pink and green. It is backed by a cement backer board, and a thicker wire mesh. THEN behind that is the lathe and plaster.

To add insulation in the other room we remodeled we added 2×2 furring strips to the exterior cinderblock walls. We anchored them with cement anchors to make sure they were secure. This allowed a little more room to add things like electrical boxes, since there is only about one in each space. Then on top of the 2×2 strips, we added a rigid foam insulation panel to try and keep some heat in the space. Then we drywalled on top of this. It DOES make the wall thicker, and I was initially worried about cutting into the square footage of the room, but overall it didn’t seem to make a huge difference in space, but it DID make a huge difference in the heat regulation of the room.

With the bathroom, now that I have removed so much of the wall tile, backer board, and lathe and plaster, by the time we build the walls back out with the same method in the other room, the walls will be just about as thick as they were before. This is great since the space is smaller.

I have been having to slowly chisel all of the tile off the exterior walls one by one since they are just cemented to the cinderblock walls. SLOW GOING.

The demo is almost done. All I have left is the ceiling, shower, linoleum and one closet. That sounds like a lot once I write it out like that haha.

I have been doing the demo pretty much alone since I have the time while the hubby is at work during the day. Breaks have been taken, but it has been EXHAUSTING on my body. I have been dragging down garbage can after can of tile, cement, and debris. Home gym? Check.

Yesterday there was too much to carry and I was so sore, I opened a window and chucked it out to the front lawn like you see angry wives do with husbands clothes in movies…. Im sure my neighbors love me.

This is at the bottom by the can. I was throwing things out the second level window trying to get it in the trash can.

We are in the weird middle phase where there is dust in the air, scraps litter the ground outside by our garbage cans, a toilet is sitting outside amongst bags of tile waiting for the dump, and my hair is full of cement chunks and dust. We rented a dump trailer and hopefully by Saturday things will look a little less crazy.

Supplies are ordered and showing up daily. I just got the marble backing that will go behind the vanity.. ITS A BOLD choice that I can so excited about. I cannot wait to start framing this next week. The One room challenge has been a great push to get this project that has been on our dream list forever… DONE.

This is currently our curb right now.. Which is embarrassing to say the least. Saturday can’t come fast enough.

We have found some interesting things along the way. Ill share in photos with captions since there is just so much.

Behind one of the walls was a hole pile of razorblades… Like hundreds of them.

At some point it looks like there was wallpaper IN THE SHOWER. I took down the shower rod to find wallpaper behind it OVER the tile…..

We found out the corner where the shelves were is hollow! There is a pipe there, but it is within the 2 x 6 wall framing, so we are going to reclaim this space in the final design!

After removing some of the wall mirrors, we found traces of a double vanity covered up. WITH TWO HOT ELECTRICAL BOXES. Who knows how long those have been covered up?