This week we finally faced head on the water damage in our bathrooms. The repairs have begun! The problem was a little more limited than we thought. And a little more extensive… look at me being the grumpy pessimist. It’s kind of a scary job though.

First we had to rip up the floor in the master bathroom. After that we had to take out some of the wall next to the tub. Then we had to saw apart the plastic plumbing connected to the bathtub. Daniel and I moved the tub out of the way into our bedroom. (Thanks to Daniel for pointing out that the tub could be pushed through a hidden service door. Before that I had been unsuccessfully trying to lift it out of the bathroom over a toilet and sink.) Then we had to cut up the flooring and then the subflooring in the guest bathroom. By Saturday afternoon all the decayed wood was cut away. You could stand in the center of a 4′ x 6′ hole that connected both bathrooms and went down to the dirt underneath the house. As far as we know we are not being invaded by too many bugs and critters, though we do have a bathtub sitting smack dab in the center of our bedroom. It really quite romantic, and we may suggest it to contractors in the future.

We finished the day Saturday by putting some boards down for subflooring. It is super-strong, thankfully. The house was built really solidly everywhere else and we didn’t want to make it any weaker in our patches. There’s still a lot of work to do this week before we can use our shower again! It’s our only shower, unfortunately. We have borrowed the showers at Jeff and Lauren’s and at Tara and Larry’s already this weekend. I especially needed it after climbing out of the crawl space with dirt and sawdust and fiberglass insulation all over my clothes and body. Family has been super helpful this project, from the showers to truck errands, to my Gramma Sophie buying Chad a yard stick, it has been really nice.

I was so proud of Elisa on our last hardware store run. We needed to find plywood subflooring that was exactly 15/16″ thick. Nobody sold the right size. Then Elisa figured out that the previous owners must have stacked two pieces that were 15/32″ thick.

We’ve had a really busy week. Elisa and I took a nap this afternoon and we were out cold for several hours.