Ok, so last week when I said demo was complete, it actually wasn’t. The major stuff was done, but there was so much more to do than I realized. Here’s the room before I started demo last week.
I removed all the tiles last week which was fairly easy. What I didn’t realize was how difficult it would be to remove all the old mortar left on the floor underneath the tile.
The old mud was on THICK and pretty much all of it was still on the floor.
I thought I could just scrape it off with these tools but I was very wrong. 0/10 recommend this method.
I got about one tile’s worth of mortar removed with the scraper when the blade broke.
I had bought two scrapers, the larger more expensive one and a smaller, cheaper one that came with a few replacement blades. The bigger scraper did not have extra blades so when that broke it was done.
The smaller scraper was working for a little bit but then I broke that blade too. Put a new one in and about five minutes after that, the handle broke off completely. This is when I gave up on scraping it by hand and decided to invest in a power tool.
I ended up buying a tool because it was the same price as renting one, and I couldn’t find any available to rent anyway. I bought a Rotary Hammer Drill with a chisel bit.
This thing worked pretty well but it was still tough to remove and still took a couple hours and a lot of effort.
I couldn’t believe how much rubble I removed from the floor. You can see in this picture that I hadn’t even gotten it all off yet. It added up to about 100 pounds of mortar removed!
It was definitely satisfying getting this stuff off the floor. Now I know why people just put LVP right on top of the tile without removing it. Because it’s a lot of work! I think it will be worth it though because the tiles were damaged and now I know how to do it. Plus I have a new power tool that I learned how to use and I’m sure it will come in handy in the future.
Again, I thought we were done with the demo, but it turns out this wall could actually be load bearing so with the advice of our contractor/architect friend, we’re going to be reinforcing it and building a temporary false wall before removing the studs. We had to remove more drywall to expose the actual load bearing part of the wall so we could figure out where to reinforce everything.
Now you can see where the support studs are all the way on the left. We’re going to reinforce it above and on the sides framing out the new doorway.
I am pretty proud of myself for figuring out how to move this cable box that is threaded through the exterior wall. When they installed it, they didn’t really bother to put it in a convenient spot. You can even see where the old one was. So my plan was to move it far enough towards the corner so that eventually it will be hidden inside the lower cabinet of the built in. When I took it off the wall, I saw that there was plenty of extra wire so all I had to do was cut a line in the drywall and move the wire over. Then I drilled new holes and hung it back up. Pretty easy! Of course now I will have to do a minor drywall repair to close up the gash that I cut, but when that is done, it will be completely out of sight and you’ll never know it was there to begin with.
I also patched up all the nail holes and drywall anchor holes and prepped for paint with a coat of primer. I’m thinking I may take off the door trim as well.
I primed this wall even though it is going to be completely covered up by the built ins. Might as well!
Primed and ready for paint! I’m determined to have at least one pretty wall to look at next week, even if the rest of the room is still a mess.
That’s it for Week 3! Hopefully things will start looking better next week! Until then, check out the progress of the other participants on the ORC Blog here: https://www.oneroomchallenge.com/orc-blog
Until next week!
-Selene Builds Things