On Day 1 of owning our new little condo, I decided that the old bathroom tiles just had to go.  The bathroom is incredibly small, and the ugly and very dirty bathroom tiles made the bathroom feel unbearable. So we went from this usable but dirty looking before…

…to this much dirtier demolished bathroom.  Right away, I knew that we were in for a big project.  I had hoped that the substrate below the tiles would be in good condition so that we could simply re-tile.  Sadly, it just wasn’t that easy.  I immediately realized that there was water damage below the tiles.  The substrate that the previous renovator used was only 1/4 inch and was the type that you use for floors, not shower surrounds.  It literally crumbled into pebbles.  This made removing the tiles incredibly difficult.  We had nothing to use to push the tiles off with.

Hubs takes his turn at demo-ing the bath shower surround.

You know hubs had to take a turn at removing all those ugly tiles.  We realized that our favorite tile removal tool was the hammer and a flat head screw driver.  Wear your gloves, them tiles are sharp!

Down to the studs

By the third day, we had had finally started seeing more progress.  We were down to the studs and could see the demolition moving somewhere.

Honestly, I can’t even remember when we finally completed the demolition.  It took a lot longer than we expected.  Granted, we were painting, packing, and moving at the same time.  We didn’t spend full days working on the reno.

And how did we get rid of all the trash that we generated?

Removing the Old Tiles and Substrate

We put them in buckets and trash cans. They went in the car and back to our old apartment complex where we dumped them in the big commercial dumpster.  We were lucky to close on our condo 2 weeks before the end of our apartment lease.  Seriously, showers are necessary when you’re demo-ing a shower!