Toilets, tile and demolition hammers, oh my {Part 3}

Happy love day, friends! 

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This is not exactly a romantic story. (For love day cuteness, check out this mornings instagram!) It’s a story about toilets, tile and demolition hammers, oh my!  But, I’m sure y’all have had enough cheesy goodness to last you a lifetime on C.R.A.F.T. Since we’ve been Sharing the Love for over a month now! It’s about time, we get back to our regularly scheduled program, right? And you know, destroy bathrooms! (Here’s bathroom remodel Part 1 and Part 2, if you are confused.) So, where to start… let’s just start with the tips and tricks, and then I’ll tell you our romantic toilet tale.  This is a 2 part post about:

• How to remove a toilet
• Bathroom demolition tips and tricks

One of the first steps to demolishing a bathroom is to remove the toilet. So, here are the super exciting steps to removing a toilet:

• Turn the water off at the base of the hose that connects to your toilet…the valve will be on the wall side of the hose.
• Flush the toilet until as much water as possible drains from the tank. Not all of the water will flush.
• Use rags to soak leftover water out of tank and bowl so that you aren’t dealing with toilet water splashing on you and your floors once you disconnect the toilet from the floor.
• Disconnect the hose from the toilet tank.
• Cut around the paint and caulk (Hopefully you don’t have painted tiles and you are just dealing with caulk).
• Unscrew the nuts on each side of the toilet bowl base, we had one bolt on each side. These are located under the weird/annoying little plastic caps that don’t connect to anything and love to collect toilet nastiness.
• Lift the toilet bowl straight up and off of the bolts sticking out of the floor.
• Use an old rag and shove it in the hole in the floor so that sewer gases do not come into your house. Just a little FYI in case your rag goes missing: I read some crazy things online about rats crawling up the pipes and eating the rags?!

After the toilet is removed, you’re almost ready to crank up the demolition hammer, but first you need to prepare the room for demolition:

• Cover your bathtub and shower drain. You don’t want tile/wall debris clogging your pipes.
• Consider the walls outside of the area you are demolishing and take down any pictures or mirrors that could be knocked off of the wall. (We removed our big mirror from the wall in the living room since it shares a wall with the bathroom).
• Save your molding! Even if you don’t think you’ll need it.
• Consider selling your fixtures and mirrors on craigslist. (We made $150 selling 2 mirrors and 2 fixtures!)
• Have a plan for hauling all of the debris to the dump. In Austin, it costs $44 a ton, plus you’ll need  to rent/ borrow a trailer if you don’t own one.
• Create a plastic shield of a door to keep all of the dust inside the room and open the window if possible.
• Wear earplugs, a dust mask and goggles too. That demolition hammer is loud and dirty.

Here are some of the tips in action: 1) Remove mirror and sell that puppy 2) Save your moldings! 3) Tape over your drains 4) Build yourself a plastic door

And now for the tale of the toilets: Andy had lofty goals of doing the demolition himself. We were home with the rented demolition hammer from Home Depot in hand at 6:30pm, and Andy was destroying by 8. It took a good hour and half to take down light fixtures, mirrors, moldings, and remove the toilet. By 11:30pm (our bedtime!) this is where operation bathroom demolishing stood. Andy made some good progress, but this was clearly not going to be as speedy as expected. (On the renting tools note, always a smart move in my book to rent large, expensive tools! We don’t have room to store them or really want to fork over the $650 to buy such a specialized tool in the first place. You can rent tons of tools, trucks, and equipment at Home Depot.)

One dude + one demolition hammer + 3.5 hours=

So, 3 and half hours later, he had demolished about 1/15th of the bathroom. At the rate, demolition was going to take 52+ more hours of work. The demolition hammer costs $50 a day, and since Andy can only legitimately work (on a work day) a max of 5 hours a night (and that’s pushing it), we were looking at 10 more nights of this! He could have whipped it out in a weekend, but the following weekend was a a baby shower! We have a baby deadline (i.e. bathroom deadline!) of March 15th, folks. This was not going to work. Andy was happy that he got to test the waters, and use that fancy demolition hammer, but in the end we decided to pay the bacon instead of DIY. (That’s kind of romantic, right? Read: We wanted to spend our evenings eating dinner together and chatting about our day by the fire vs. destroying a bathroom, ha!) After calling around we were able to get a crew of  6 over on Friday to demolish our bathroom and haul away the trash for $400. The crew did this in less than 7 hours. Holla. In the end, we saved money since we would have had to rent the hammer per day at $50, rent a trailer to haul the debris away, and pay the dumping fee. Not to mention time equals bacon.

Same view as above, way different scene. I think it’s safe to say that Andy was impressed.

And here’s the demolished view from the other angle:

I have to admit I’m a little sad to see the mint green hexagons go. Well, I guess I’m really sad they were painted in the first place. But, this bathroom is going to be so fray-shh (that’s how Andy’s fam in Ohio talk!) and clean when it’s done. I can’t wait. Have you ever used a demolition hammer? Demolished your bathroom? Had to decide between spending the bacon and DIY-ing? Can you believe the crew of 6 did this to our bathroom in 7 hours? How’s that for a Valentines day post!

UPDATE: Here is the big bathroom remodel reveal!