Demolition begins!

For those of you who haven't had to listen to me complain (lucky you!), the shower in our master bathroom was leaking. I found the leak by chance. My student teacher wanted to read the book Holes to my class. I knew that I had purchased it for Cindy or Chris for Christmas one year, so one mid February morning, I went in search of it. Boy was I glad I did.

Of course I didn't look for it until the morning that I was supposed to bring it to school. So Bill was in the shower while I was rummaging through the kids rooms. I opened Cindy's closet and heard a dripping noise. I looked up and to my horror, there was a hole in the ceiling with water dripping out of it. Luckily Cindy had a ton of stuff in her closet on the floor. All of the water had dripped onto a comforter that she had stuffed into the corner. My carpet seems to be fine -- the comforter is another story -- it ended up in the garbage can. The leak was enough to cause damage in the ceiling, but not enough to soak all the way through the comforter. It probably was mostly dry before getting rained on again the next day.

So since February, we've been showering in Andrew's bathroom. I've been saving money and hoping it would be enough since I wanted to get it done before going back to school. R.J Schmidt Builders had the best recommendations and the best price -- still more than we were hoping, but I'm getting a whole new bathroom -- for the most part.



They had to rip the ceiling out of Cindy's closet. You can see the black mold that was around the pipe. It was all over the drywall of the ceiling as well. We sprayed it with Bleach, but the builder said that as long as we don't get it wet again, we shouldn't have issues from the toxic mold. The section that you can see in this picture was cut out of the plywood. He moved the drain to the side and there is very little mold left in the closet. We were able to shine a light on the drywall ceiling above the bedroom and bathroom, and we couldn't see any spots of mold.


There was a ton of insulation around the shower. As you can see it was the newspapery stuff which they blow in between the walls after they put up the drywall. It was everywhere. I'm so thankful that the builder is fantastic, and they cleaned up everything -- they even vacuumed the kitchen rug where they had tracked a few small pieces of insulation. I've been very impressed and so far, I would recommend them for any project!!