The start of a new project

We have gone and made something of a giant mess of the master bathroom. Actually, to be perfectly accurate (something I've never really concerned myself overmuch with before, but it's a new year), the mess is now all over the garage floor, but moving it from one part of the house to another doesn't magically eliminate it - much to our chagrin.

The holes in the wall and the great gaping absence where the tub used to be, on the other hand, are much more difficult to move from one location to another and are thus pretty much right where we left them. In the wall. Or, on the floor.

Man, I'm two paragraphs into this post and and I'm already boring myself to tears. How about we just get to the pictures, eh?

I'm not feeling particularly ... wordsome tonight, so I think I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves. Hopefully this post will get me back in the swing and maybe next time I'll have stories and other awesome happenings to relate but right now... meh, I'm just tired.

In case you've forgotten, here's the master bath before we started ripping it apart (except for that patch I cut away to find out whether the floor went all the way to the wall):

 START THE DEMOLITIONSES!

That was... harder than it seems, actually.  The tiles that were left on the ledge thing seemed to have been installed professionally, and the ones on the wall were actually glued to the drywall (so, NOT professionally). I wound up just cutting at the drywall seams and yanking the pieces of wall right off with the tiles still attached.

Once I got the shelf off, I found that the plumbing was also less than optimal. Here's me in my oh-so-fashionable do-rag pointing out the shelf that ran under the copper pipe that fed the shower head, which in turn ran right underneath the tiled plywood shelf:

Kind of amazed that there weren't any leaks, what with all the screws and nails in the immediate vicinity.

Of course, the tub wasn't coming out without a fight either, but that is, after all, exactly why I own a reciprocating saw:

Hee hee hee. Tub never saw it coming. Get it? Saw it coming?

Shut up.

Anyway, to cut a long series of demolition and cleaning short, here's what the bathroom looked like with the mess cleared away, a quick-and-dirty protective box built around the plumbing shut-offs, and a couple of scrap pieces of lumber tacked up over the holes to keep the damn cats out of the soffits (there's a little roof outside there that'll show up when I get around to taking some outside shots):

And that's pretty much exactly how it stayed for two months. Out trusty contractor, Mike, was supposed to come and install a new window, but the assholes we ordered the window from couldn't be arsed to make it for us.

Until this morning, that is.

Ta-da! New window!

Now come the hard parts... tiling, drywalling, plumbing, wrestling a four-hundred pound tub up the stairs, painting, etc.

Stay tuned!