Half-Bath step 1 & 2

I've mentioned that the motivation behind the new half bath was to get the bathroom out of the kitchen area and to get the pantry in the kitchen area. Well the bathroom part is now functional (we're finishing the finishing touches) and so I'm going to rewind a week and show you step by step what we have done.

We budgeted about $850 for this renovations. We're doing this by doing everything by ourselves and reusing anything we can.

The first step of this renovation was clearing out the respective rooms and doing some demolition. Nate did most of this last Thursday while I was out.

The major part of the budget went to the next step. When we rip things apart, we like to take that opportunity to update plumbing and electrical. This is not a super pretty part (I wish I had gotten a pic of Nate after being down in the crawl space) but it really makes us sleep better knowing things are up to code.

In order to replace the plumbing and electrical, we had to get rid of the old stuff. The closet originally had no outlets, no switches and just a light with a little switch on it. We got rid of that and installed a fan in its place (the window doesn't open and we feel it is important to have ventilation in a bathroom). We also put in wiring for 2 lights on the wall, a switch for the lights and the fan and an outlet.

As for the plumbing, the closet didn't have any plumbing originally, but it shared the wall with the old bathroom. So we took half the wall down (which we were going to tile anyways) so that we could take out the old cast iron pipes and turn the pluming to the correct side of the wall.

In order to get rid of the old cast iron vent pipe with out the whole thing falling down, we had to support it and then we (very carefully) broke away the old cast iron pipe from the point of the drain down. This was replaced with nice new pvc piping.

We also drilled a hole for the new toilet and installed a new drain for the toilet. There was already a hole in a convient place for the supply line so we were able to use that instead of drilling another hole through the floor (we are not replacing the floor).

The reason the toilet is in this picture is because we brought it in to figure out how far back we could put it without people hitting their head on the sloped ceiling.

So that was the first couple of days of renovating the half bath. Nate spent a lot of time under the house getting super dirty but it was great to get all of the hidden important stuff taken care of.