Remember last fall when we started work on the downstairs bathroom? You know, the one with the floral wallpaper, floral border, floral curtains, and shiny brass fixtures? Allow me jog your memory. 

Here's a look into the bathroom from the office the day we bought the house:

And here was the stunning view looking forward from the toilet:

We spent a couple months, a fair amount of elbow grease, and not a lot of money ripping out all traces of the flowers, installing new lights, skim coating and painting the walls, adding accessories, and generally completing a quick and easy makeover that transformed it into a space we could live with for quite some time.

Here was the same view as you enter the bathroom, but after we did our quick updates:

While it wasn't perfect, it was workable and we liked it.

I was thrilled. It wasn't a full on renovation, but it was cute, it was more "us", and I was happy to have it as our main floor bathroom. But then there was the whole house freeze and plumbing disaster of February 2015, and cosmetic improvements have taken a backseat to the important but completely non-sexy work of installing a brand new HVAC system as well as re-plumbing the entire house.

As Alex detailed last week, we're nearing the end of this major undertaking and know the house will be better for it on the flip side. But what we haven't shown you yet is all how every single room in the house is now torn up for one reason or another. Whether it was for the removal of the old baseboard radiators, new holes for HVAC ducts, or torn open cavities for new plumbing lines (or the removal of the old), every single room has something for us to address. We'll give you a full look in the near future, but I wanted to start by showing you how the work has impacted our briefly cute first floor bathroom.

Where we once had newly skimmed walls and a fresh coat of paint, now we have gaping holes where the baseboard radiators have been torn out, missing sections of drywall, a missing wall where there once was tile, and no sink anywhere in sight. 

 Well, I guess you could find it if you open up the shed that is now containing a lot of our construction debris.

The bright side of the current state of the bathroom is that we now have a flushing toilet, and a new one to boot. Having been through the events of the last six months at the house, we now have a newfound appreciation for indoor plumbing. (And I don't even want to talk about what our short term solution was in the months that we didn't have a functional throne. Let's just say strategically timed visits and purposeful dehydration were my strategy, and made my days at Girl Scout camp seem glamorous.)

As strange as it may sound, now that the room is a total wreck and we'll have to turn our attention to improving it once again, I can't stop thinking about how much I want to rip up the floor tile. While in photos the small 2"x2" white tiles don't seem so bad, in person they're cracked, stained, and the grout is flaking and peeling in many places. When we first did our quick makeover, as tempted as we were to address the tile too, we showed some restraint and opted to leave it as is. But now that we're going to be adding drywall, making custom baseboards, building a vanity, and spending a substantial amount of effort to get it back in shape we, or at least I, couldn't help but start talking about it on our drive to the house this weekend. 

"So...what do you think about maybe ripping up the tile in the bathroom?" I asked Alex tentatively.

This simple question kicked off a 30 minute discussion of how we both hate the tile, that it was installed poorly on a sub floor that flexes and cracks the grout, and that the room is so small it wouldn't be that time consuming or expensive to address. He mentioned that while in the crawl space below, he noticed the original hardwood floors are still there under the subfloor, and it might be worthwhile to use it as the bathroom floor. We also talked about how we have some leftover tile from our master bathroom project, and maybe if the original floor is in bad shape, just maybe, we'd have enough leftover to complete this project.

I know, I know. The entire house is torn up, we're in way over our heads, and we're both on the brink of a full fledged nervous breakdown. But, and a big but here, maybe it'd just be worth doing a little exploratory surgery in the area that will be under the new vanity? I mean, if the tile proved to be too much of a pain to pull up, the original floors are a total mess, or we realize that we're insane for wanting to add to the project list, we could just cover it up and address it later when we do a full fledged renovation? 

So guess what I did this weekend? Here's a hint: 

While Alex was putting up furring strips for some drywall work we're doing in the living room, I decided to go on a manic cleaning frenzy and, well, do a little bathroom demo. Armed with a hammer, pry bar, and proper protective eyewear, I started chiseling the tile.

The poorly adhered tiles were held down with a sort of glue rather than grout and came up without too much of a struggle. About 20 minutes later here's what I was left with.

Fearing I might damage the new plumbing supply lines with my chronic impatience, I called in Alex to back me up in pulling out the subfloor. Unlike the tile, the subfloor put up more of a fight, and soon turned into a splintery mess. 

But with careful persistence, he soon had that section out. After a quick cleanup, we were left with this:

While I wouldn't exactly say we were jumping with joy, we're encouraged. The original floor may have some life left in it. At the very least, we've decided we're going to continue with demo and try to refinish the floors. And as tempting as it is to keep on ripping it out now, this is currently our only flushable bathroom. (I won't say functional as it doesn't have a sink.) So until the pros are out of the way, and until we have another bathroom option, this is where we'll pause.

The plan, when we resume in a few weeks, is to try to use the original wood floor, and if that doesn't work, we'll put down new subfloor and lay new tile. If we go the tile route, we'll try to use the marble hex we have left over from our master bathroom, or some other low cost alternative if we don't have enough.

One other thing that's sort of exciting is that you can see horizontal boards used as the wall cladding. I felt a little like Joanna and Chip discovering ship lap under layers of drywall. Who knows, we may even be inspired enough to expose it during our efforts. 

I can't wait to update you as work progresses. I'm hoping this is a weekend or two of effort total, but you know how that can easily get out of control.