We've been ripping up a lot of tile

Now that I'm getting caught up on a lot of home improvement posts, I have a more recent update for  you all! Hubs has been slowly chipping away at our tile. In the WHOLE HOUSE. You may have noticed some tool expenditures in the January spending report, and this would be why!

For those of you who don't know, we are removing the flooring for a few reasons:

We don't have tile under our bathroom sink.

When we moved in, we realized that the large cabinet in our bathroom that was supposed to be a bathroom vanity, was just a kitchen cabinet with a bathroom sink on top... and that it was poorly connected to the plumbing. When water damage was in the unit prior to the sell, they realized they couldn't purchase a new bathroom vanity that would work with the old floor layout (they would have to re-do the floors because cabinets aren't the same size they were 20 years ago). Naturally they didn't want to spend that much money to sell it, having the same tile everywhere else, so they tossed a kitchen cabinet in there with a sink, since it was larger than the missing tile portion.

It was horrible. Too close to the toilet, no actual storage space in there. The doors didn't have shelves, just opened to one large space.

We installed an IKEA wall mounted cabinet (the legs are just for "show") but we don't have tile on the floor there... it hasn't bothered us since we moved in, but its missing.   

No tile here...

When we installed our new tub, they took out a couple tiles to make it sit properly on the concrete.

I gave them permission to do this in advance if it was necessary since there was no tile under the sink and i'd rather have my new tub properly installed and level.

We also removed that weird "half wall" glass partition in our kitchen that was an electrical nightmare. 

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If you don't remember the pantry turned office space that was too small for a laptop and contained more fire hazards then I could count, were glad its gone...  We have much more open concept space with it out, but its removal left a fun "gap" in our tile. 

Also, all throughout the house there are high and low gaps, grout lines that don't match, places where the tile isn't even straight with the wall... it was poorly done. 

So new flooring would be in our future.

We got an initial flooring measure and quote from home depot a while ago to replace all of our flooring, which was for $8,762.98, which includes removing tile and replacing it and new carpet in our master bedroom... but there are always "contingencies" with any improvement project and we don't have the full $9,000 right now. We decided a new tub was something that needed to take priority over new floors and every day, we feel we made the right decision. 

The quote above also didn't include putting on baseboards, which we had to remove for the massive ant infestation we endured right after moving in. 

We also found out (because I ask questions) that if they remove the tile and there is damage to the concrete, any cracks, etc more costs get added on... 

Right now, about half the cost is for tile removal, so we decided to start to remove the tile ourselves, and reassess the quote when they can see the bare concrete. It's a good thing we did. 

Hubs started hitting out tile the old cheap way. Hammer, mallet, and sweat equity. He made some progress, but getting the thin set up was hard work so the ground would be smooth enough to walk on... 

 So we bought some tools, hit out a few more tiles and were making some great progress.

Little man and I had a birthday party to attend, hubs thought it might be a good day to do some work in his room, since we would be out of the house.  He planned to only remove some tile that we could hide with his bed and set to work. It was going great so he popped out another row and the found water....

water under our tile.... 

We had no idea if it was a slab leak, prior water damage that never dried, or from the recent rains, so we couldn't stop until we found dry tile... So he kept going... with every tile we popped out, we were left with more water... then a dry tile, then more water... We ended up having to remove all of the tile in a single day from his room.

I even helped out and got a few tiles out after the party, but hubs did like 99% of the work.  We got all the tile up, but not the thin set because it was too wet to come up with tools and hubs wanted to dry it out. We set up fans and sure enough, the next morning it was dry.

 Little man slept "camp" style in the living room and the next day hubs removed all the thin set.

We found 2 cracks in the concrete slab, but we also had 7 days of continuous rain before we decided to rip up the tile. So we don't know if the water came from the rain up through the cracks because the last homeowners DID NOT sealed the concrete before adding tile... No moisture barrier... 

So now we are going to have to wait for more rain to see if we run into this issue again and leave the bare slab... so we just tossed a large area rug from the living room so little man has "most of a floor"...

 If we don't get rain soon, we are going to saturate the outer walls with gallons of water around our unit to "make rain effects" and see what happens. 

So now we do "rug checks..."