The tale of the bathroom remodel - part I

I thought it might be a nice change to show my readers one of my own projects.  Maybe it might even give me a bit more credibility with some of you.  Regardless, my husband and I have been living in a bit of a disaster area lately while I work on my latest project; the bathroom remodel. 

We live in the heart of downtown Chicago, one of the most beautiful cities I've ever experienced.  Our home was built after the great Chicago Fire of 1871, having been completed in 1882.  If you do the math, that's a bit more than 125 years old.  While I quite adore the "charm" of our historic vintage home, and the history that comes along with it, the frustrations of owning a home of this age can be stressful to say the least.  For visual purposes, here's an exterior shot of my home that I took right before we closed on our condo.

A few months ago we had a plumber come in and evaluate our pipes in our master bathroom.  He believed that we had a leak in our shower pipes most likely was resulting potential/possible damage to the unit below ours.  Not good.  Since we never liked the bathroom to begin with, and had always planned to remodel it at some juncture, we decided it was probably best to have the project start sooner rather than later. 

We interviewed some contractors, and ended up hiring a wonderful guy named Mark DeBartolo.  Mark is President of Len Home Services. We sat down with Mark and determined a budget, goals, and discussed the desired design before making a plan of attack. Mark, my husband and I determined a date for bathroom demo and commenced work on January 11th.  For reference, here is a picture of our hideous bathroom BEFORE.   (Yes, that is my cat Rylie sitting on the toilet, also known as his favorite perch).

It's 10 days later and our entire bathroom has been gutted.  Mark's crew had to remove our old cast iron tub down 3 flights of stairs as well during the demolition.  I'm sorry about that Mark!  They began by removing everything in addition to the bathroom tub.  At the end of day 2, here's what our bathroom had become.  A scary, barren shell of a room.  It was quite interesting to see the bricks that had been constructed over 125 years ago in my bathroom, still holding up and doing their job.  However, reinforcements were needed and in addition to rebuilding some of the floor after my husband stepped through the rotted wood; new wood, plumbing fixtures and drywall were installed.  We even had to do some improvising when installing the plumbing fixtures - our contractor had to literally chip away old brick to install the new fixtures, (see image on the left). I came home a few days ago to a bathroom covered entirely of red brick dust...

At this point we are done with the demolition, and interior wall rebuilding, and I'm starting to feel like there is light at the end of the tunnel.  I've been showering in a neighbors home this past week and a half and as nice as Donna has been in letting us do so, I'm ready to shower in my own home again.  Drywall installation was completed yesterday, and the tiling work began.  Here is an image of the beginning of the end - drywall installed! 

I will be documenting the rest of the remodel real time hopefully.  I'm very anxious to see how it turns out and will happily post a gallery of before and after images upon completion. 

A final note - we are approximately 45% of the way done with this project, and while I have heard many nightmares regarding working with contractors, this experience has been mostly stress free.  Aside from living in chaos and showering at a neighbors home, we have been smooth sailing... I feel lucky that we hired Mark and his team for this job, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the final product.  I definitely will keep you posted.