The Bathroom Floor Continues

Our plan for today’s post was to reveal our new bathroom floor in all of its glory.  In fact my mom even mentioned that it was finished when she pre-wrote/pre-published a post last week.  (Now you know that we occasionally take care of blog business early so we can enjoy life).  Well, I’m here to tell you that it is not finished.  It’s all part of the keeping it real that we do around here.  When I last left you with a bathroom floor update, our bathroom looked like this.

 

Are you sitting down and ready to see how the floor looks right now??

 

Yep!  This project was a total fail, and we are now calling in the professionals.  We tried, but we also knew when to walk away because it was kicking our butts.  We were on a time crunch, and that didn’t help matters. Thankfully, our Thanksgiving guests were okay with sharing the half bath – but not at the same time.  At least the shower in the project bathroom still worked.  We had plenty of other things to be thankful for even if the floor was not finished.

 

 

Let me tell you how this happened.  Once Yankee made it down to the original subfloor, we had to reinforce it with another layer of a plywood subfloor.  We had some squeaky boards that Yankee fixed before applying the plywood section of the floor.  Also, since we had two levels of tile and concrete, we had to rebuild the floor to add some height.

 

 

The pieces were cut and were glued and screwed down just as the directions stated.

 

 

Yankee mixed up some thin set and then was ready to apply the backer board.

 

 

This task was done late at night which worked because it needed to dry overnight.  However, when we woke up the next morning, we found a small section that was still wet.

 

 

One thing lead to another, and Yankee started cutting out sections of the wall.  We discovered a leak, and it turned out that it was a super, super slow leak.  However, we are glad we found it.  That night our neighbor came over, and the two guys worked on the leak and repaired the situation.

 

 

Since the leak was fixed, we were able to move onto the next step which was adding our floor heat before adding the self leveling concrete.  Much research was done, and for our old house this was the way to go.

 

 

We mixed away, and the self-leveling concrete was going on great and slowly working its way around the floor.  However, it didn’t seem to do much in the leveling department.  After that dried, we realized we needed to add one more bag of self-leveling concrete.  That’s when we realized we had trouble.

 

 

The last bag did not go down nearly as well, and it sounded like Rice Krispies with a snap, crackle, and pop.  We tried to smooth it out some, and that made everything worse.  Here you can see how this is not smooth, and there is no way we were able to put thin set and tile on top of this disaster.

 

 

This is where we are right now.  We have a really uneven floor and are stuck.  Now we are trying to get some recommendations of people who can fix the problem and install the floor.  So, at this point the story does not have a happy ending, but hopefully it will soon.   Stay tuned……

Did you ever do a project that turned into a disaster, and you had to call in the professionals?

Cheers!