We started off so well. If you’ve noticed my Instagram feed over there, there’s a picture of a bunch of boxes containing my new toilet, my new tub, and my new tub surround. We’d gotten a bunch of flooring samples from a place online and had narrowed our flooring choices down to two possibilities, one light and one dark. We’d found a vanity or two we liked, and a store that would let us custom-design basically whatever the hell we wanted without blowing our budget up too goddamn much.

Then my father-in-law came over. You remember my father-in-law the general contractor, right? The guy who gave my brother a heart attack when, ten seconds after arriving at the Great Redeckening, he pronounced our wood incorrect?

Yeah. That guy.

“That tub’s not going to work,” he says. Which means the surround isn’t going to work. And I am now very angry– not at him, because he’s right, and more importantly he’s right well before we started destroying our tub or taking things out of boxes and he’s right while we can still take stuff back. I’m angry because I shoulda noticed this shit on my own and I didn’t.

60 inches is basically standard for a tub nowadays, right? I had measured our tub and it had come out to 58 inches from tile to tile– which, I reasoned, given that there was a layer of tile and, underneath that, a layer of drywall, meant that there was certainly going to be sixty inches from stud to stud. The new surround attaches directly to the studs, so all of that stuff was going to come out and then the tub would fit.

Take a real close look at that picture there and see if you can figure out what’s wrong. Go ahead; I’ll wait. No, not the rotten drywall and the mold. We knew about that already; that’s the problem we were going to fix with the new tub and new surround. We discovered the leak when the wallpaper back there started turning black– it’s close to the floor in between the tub and the toilet, though, so it was easy to ignore. Then the drywall started disintegrating. I ripped some of it out to try and figure out how bad it was; it’s actually not very moldy– the black is all on the surface and the wood itself is still, mostly, solid. The white thing on the left is a guard that we put in that (I thought at the time) would stop the leak– I thought water was just running along the edge of the tub and hitting the drywall. No, as it turns out, it’s behind the tile, as we discovered when we pulled one of the tiles out and ran some water. The leak’s not in the tub at all.

But forget about that. Look at the tub, and then look at the wall stud above it. See a problem?

The tub extends a good inch underneath the studs. These fuckers who built this house put the tub in before they even studded the wall, and then built a bloody header over the top of the thing. Which means that any sixty inch tub that expects to have a surround around it is going to be wider than the bathroom is. It’s impossible to put any other modern sixty inch tub in there without moving fucking walls around, and that’s not a level of work that we’re willing to commit to at this time.

My father-in-law figured all this out at a glance.

We have to keep the tub, but we’re still going to have to rip out the tile. There was a brief flirtation with 54″ tubs, but after looking around a bit we decided against that idea on account of they’re all crap. What we’re going to have to do is pull out all the existing tile, pull out all the drywall behind it (which is going to be mostly rotten and moldy at this point anyway), then redrywall (hopefully with a thinner board than they’re using) and retile over that. Tiling is beyond my skill level, so we’ll have to hire someone for it, which is probably gonna blow up our budget– although we’ll make a tiny bit of it back by not having to buy a new tub, I doubt we’ll get anybody to come out and do the new tile work for less than the tub would have cost– although I’ll admit I haven’t really looked into it much so maybe I’ll get lucky.

Also, so much for getting all this done by next weekend. Don’t think so. Sigh.

Today, we start work (well, sorta) on our next home improvement project: destroying our larger bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.  (After that?  Destroying our smaller bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.)  The bathroom has forced us into a cascade situation, where each thing we want to replace has forced us to replace another thing, until finally we’re gutting everything but the walls.  And we may still need to pull those down, depending on how successful we are at getting the previous owners’ wallpaper down.  I’m guessing we’ll need to drywall.  We definitely need to kill an unnecessary bulkhead over the tub, so there’s gonna be some drywalling no matter what; we’ll see if we have to do everything.

The budget is $2500 and I’m betting we can come in at 70% of that– it’s a small bathroom, and we don’t exactly have extravagant tastes.  Today’s project is to locate flooring; we’re thinking hard about cork tile and are going to bring the grandparents over to babysit while we hit a bunch of kitchen and bath stores in the area and see what they have available.   If you happened to notice the Instagram picture of the tile floating in a bowl of water from the other day, I bought a bunch of samples home from Lowe’s and spent an afternoon trying to destroy them.  I’m sufficiently satisfied with cork’s resilience to be willing to use it in the bathroom, especially since we’re planning on glue-down and not snap-together tiling.  It should be manageable.

The bulk of the work, right now, is slated to be done over Labor Day weekend, which is– gulp– just a couple of weeks away.  We’ve got a bunch of basic decisions made (picked out the tub, the toilet, a new ceiling fan, etc, although we still need a vanity and we haven’t bought anything yet– we probably ought to spend some money today, though, since the stuff probably isn’t going to show up immediately) but there’s still a fair amount of work to be done before we can start actually doing any work.  And then all of you get to look forward to the blog post where I describe how I destroyed my entire house while trying to install a toilet.

Whee!