Well, it took a lot of Friday and it’s left me in great pain, but the upstairs bathroom has a shiny new floor! That’s right, no more red rosin paper over tar glue… We’ve got lovely self-adhesive parquet wood over brand-spanking new plywood.
I actually started work on this quite a while ago. The upstairs bathroom had been carpeted, which is one of the stupidest things one can do to a place where water spills are a practical certainty. I yanked the carpet out, and discovered that it had been tacked down on top of linoleum tile. Said tile was in a sorry state – detaching from the plywood underneath – so up it came.
Once the tile was out of the way, I could see that the plywood had suffered some serious water damage. The wood was de-laminating where the glue had dissolved, mostly in front of the sink or around the toilet. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized just how big a job I was letting myself in for at the time, so I covered the exposed plywood with red rosin paper and put the project on hold.
Fast forward to last Thursday. That’s when a leak developed around the base of the toilet. Since this is the only working bathroom in the house, it now became a serious issue. I’d been planning on spending Friday getting wedding stuff done, but it was time to put on my remodeling hat before we found ourselves, literally, without a pot to pee in.
The project had five stages: removal of the toilet, ripping up the old plywood subfloor, installation of a new subfloor, tiling the new floor, and replacing the toilet.
Step One
Removing the toilet was surprisingly easy. First I needed to drain it, so I shut the water off at the wall, flushed the tank, and used a plunger to force the remaining water through the u-bend and out of the bowl. Then I just undid the two bolts at the base and the feed-line from the wall, and hefted the whole thing into the tub. One caution though, just in case you’re tempted to make toilet tossing a hobby: be aware that the bowl and tank weigh a lot. Plus, the seal between the toilet and the sewer pipe is usually a rather disgusting mass of sticky wax like gunk… Cleaning it off ruined a pretty good pair of work gloves.
Step Two
Once the pot itself was out of the way, I was able to run the rotozip around the edges of the walls, cutting through the edge of the plywood subfloor. Unfortunately, I ran into an unexpected snag as I was working my way along the edge of the tub. I think the rotozip must have inhaled a chunk of sawdust or something, because it suddenly started seizing up and making horrible sounds. I yanked the cord from the wall, but the damage was done… The tool was dead. It was out of warranty too, so I performed a spur-of-the-moment autopsy and discovered that, indeed, something had gotten inside and thrown off the delicate balance of the electric motor. The cooling fan had come into contact with its housing at some ungodly RPM and had partially fused to the plastic. The strain of that had broken loose one of the brushes from the motor and it was rattling around along with bits of its plastic housing… We were definitely in “All the King’s Horses” territory.
At any rate, a couple of passes with a circular saw served to slice up the plywood sheet into manageable chunks. I pried them up, bagged them, pulled up the nails, swept up the sawdust and took some measurements for a replacement. Then it was off to Lowe’s to get a 3/8″ thick sheet of plywood that could be cut down to 75″ x 38″ with some irregularities for the edge of the tub, the edge of the closet, and the flange where the toilet bolts on to the sewer pipe.
Step Three
This turned out to be more of an adventure than I thought it would be. I had the dubious honor of meeting the surliest representative of the customer service industry that I’ve ever encountered. You see, the bay where the appropriately sized sheets of plywood live was empty, so I turned to a passing red-vested employee and said, “Hi there! I was wondering if…”
And then watched in amazement as he glanced contemptuously at me, and just continued to stroll on by.
Fortunately, standing between him and his destination was a managerial figure, who witnessed our brief exchange. Said manager stepped directly into the surly one’s path with a glare, then looked over at me and said, pointedly, “Can we help you?”
They could. They did. Appropriately sized wood (and a replacement Rotozip) were procured, and I returned home to continue with the project.
There’s a potential flaw to some of my projects that I hadn’t really encountered before. I tend to measure things too exactly. It’s a problem that I inherited from working with my dad on various home remodelings while I was growing up. We both tend to cut parts to fit so exactly that there’s not enough wiggle room to actually install them in a real-world situation. Y’see, I was planning on fitting the plywood sheet, then placing a padding layer of black construction felt underneath for cushioning. The trouble is, once I got the plywood in place, it locked into position like a lego block. I couldn’t get my fingers around the edge to lift it up. So there it is. In place. Time to move on to…
Step Four
I started putting the tiles down at around three thirty in the afternoon. I’d decided not to do the whole floor at once, mostly because of a promise I’d made to my Fiancee. She insisted that there be a working toilet in the house by the time she got home from work…
Fair enough.
If you’ve never worked with self-adhesive parquet tiles before, go out and get some… I don’t care if you don’t have a project that needs them. They’re just that cool. You can easily shape them with a jigsaw or a rotozip, and they have little tongue and groove edges that interlock, so there’s no chance of creating odd accidental patterns in the wood. It took me just over an hour to get a third of the bathroom done, and since I’d started in the area around the where the toilet goes, I was ready to take a break and move on to the final part of the project.
Step Five
Putting the toilet back was the single biggest headache of the whole project. I’d managed to damage one of the tie-down bolts when I removed it back at the beginning, and I didn’t notice it until I’d already squooshed the whole thing into place on top of a new wax seal. And of course it was the bolt that was in the most awkward position… All told, it took nearly an hour to get the thing in place, tied down and flushable. If I hadn’t had spare parts on hand it would have taken a lot longer. As it was, I was about half an hour late picking my Fiancee up from work, but I did manage to keep my promise!
There’s still a few things to get done. There are some odd-shaped corners that I need to cut tile to fit, and I need to replace the baseboards and caulk around the edge of the tub, but those touches can wait for a bit…