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How to do the Demo Yourself and Save

By Andrew on February 18, 2012

A few nights ago we officially finished the demolition portion of our bathroom, so I wanted to share some of my tips for demoing safely. Even if you are going to hire a contractor for most of the work, you can save yourself a lot of money by doing the demo yourself. Here are 5 tips we followed to ensure a seamless (notice I didn’t say effortless) demo.

1. Skip the sledge hammer.

Seriously, these things do far more harm than they do good. The key to good demolition is take down exactly as much as is necessary and NO MORE. We recommend a sturdy hammer and a flat bar as your tools of choice.

2. Take out anything you are reusing first.

May sound like an obvious point, but take a few moments to consider everything you will reuse. Have you removed the trim? Is there another use for scrap wood? We are reusing our vanity doors as access panels for behind the showers in our home. What can you reuse or resell?

3. Where will the trash go?

See what services your city offers and figure out before the demo how you’ll get rid of the trash. Here in Springdale, AR the city will pick up construction waste or yard waste twice a year! How awesome is that? And if you stack it real nice they might take more than the 1 square yard they officially say they take! See if your town offers a similar service. If not, another affordable option is to use a truck or trailer to bring it to a dump. If you don’t have access to these Lowe’s and Home Depot offer a construction bag for around $100 including drop off and pick up. Just be sure to explore your options and make sure that the trash fits inside the limits of the dump service you’re using.

4. Be Intentional with the process.

Now you’re all ready to go to town right? If you have watched any DIY shows on TV your plan should be to do the opposite. Try to disassemble each piece one at a time. Think about how it was installed, and try to do the reverse. Not only is this the safest way, it is also the easiest and least messy way.

5. Use caution with water!

Plumbing was the greatest struggle in our renovation. Just turning off the water was not enough. If you are demoing near plumbing be sure to check if local shut offs are still working. Due to the pressure some of these may leak when closed, even though there are no leaks normally. Also empty any receptacles of water (like the toilet). Unless you want to use a turkey baster to get all the water out of the toilet like we did, take the toilet out before the shower so you can put the toilet directly in it to let it drain. Once the water main is shut off, run a faucet in your house to relieve pressure.

Use the overflow valve on the water heater to remove the last bit of pressure. This tip alone could have saved me 4 hours. Without doing this you may have water slowly leaking out of open pipes like we did.

Anyone can tear something up. Just be sure all your plans to put it back together are in place before your start so you don’t have an demo-ed room for months on end!

Well, we’re officially done with demo and most of the plumbing! Next on the list is getting the tub installed in mortar which we’re working on today. But first, here’s Arielle with white hair from sanding the ceiling.

So much dust…

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No turning back now…

By Arielle on February 5, 2012

So on Friday night we decided to test one tile to see how hard it was to tear out. We tore up a tile and discovered that there was laminate underneath making it fairly easy to rip up. We practiced reverse gender roles and I worked on the demo while Andrew made dinner.

Here’s a video of me ripping out tile (I’m not that handy so this feels like a big accomplishment for me!):

On Saturday we took out the vanity and the toilet. Typing it here makes it sound simple, but it most definitely was not. It involved calling the water company, getting into the crawl space (Andrew, not me), multiple trips to Lowe’s, $50, and possibly some frustration. I won’t go into the boring details, but we were trying to get the pipes to the sink not to leak when the valves were off so we could take the sink and vanity out. Also, toilets are disgusting. We didn’t want the water to leak out when we pulled it up, so we bought a turkey baster at the dollar store and I literally spent about 20 minutes sucking water out of a toilet with a baster. Nasty.

The hardest part of it all though was the fiberglass shower insert. We spent several hours today on that alone. Andrew had to cut the drywall all around it because it was nailed into the studs. Then he pulled out all the nails, cut the pipes so it would slide out, and then pulled it out. It must have been installed before the walls around the bathroom were framed, because it was not going to fit through the door in one piece. Andrew broke it into smaller pieces, and we carried it out. Again, this sounds simple…but it wasn’t.

Here is the bathroom in it’s current state. Chaucer wanted to explore.