Once I finished the demolition I started with the rebuilding.  The first step was to get the shower ready for tile.  This meant patching in a 3-piece PVC drain onto an exisiting copper drain pipe.  To do this, I cut off the old drain, and soldered on a threaded adapter to attach to the PVC.  This was my first shot at soldering pipe, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

 This is the last step of the demolish, removing the floor of the shower.   This was obviously not the original floor, but its hard to tell just what was new and what was original.  The floor itself is made of a solid 2  inches of concrete, which I think was precast.  It was quite sturdy, but after a bunch of whacks with the sledge it cracked into pieces.  Unfortunately this was the easy part.  The floor had a few pieces of re-bar through out it, as well as some metal on the edges.  I’m not sure if the metal on the edge was meant as a shower pan, or was leftover from the original installation.  Whatever it was for, it had mostly rusted away.  What hadn’t rusted away however was intact enough to make removal quite difficult as it held the large chunks of concrete together.  At this point I had already generate a few hundred pounds of debris, and was not looking forward to getting the garbage men to pick up a hundred pounds of concrete.

With the rest of the bathroom done it was time to tackle the shower.  The tiles in the shower were layed on bare sheetrock, a big no-no in a wet area.   On the upside this made tearing it out much easier.  The sheetrock was quite damp, and using a crowbar, the tiles easily fell away from it.  I was a bit scared to see what I would find behind the walls of the shower as I had dreams of giant piles of mold and fungus growing back there.   I was happily suprised to see that it wasn’t bad at all.   There were a few spots with some mildew on them, but other than thtat it was fine.

I removed the toilet, as well as the heating vent, and finished removing all of the floor tile.  Removing the toilet was quite easy, although some water did get on the floor.  I also managed to crack the base of the tile trying to get the corroded bolts out.  Fortunately I was not planning on reusing the toilet, but I would suggest that if you are you should be very careful, as it cracked quite easily.  I was very happy to find that the mortar came off the floor cleanly, as I was not looking forward to having to replace the sub-floor.  You may notice that there are some gaps in the floor on the left side of the picture.   I had originally thought the they just did a crappy job laying the floor, but it turns out that these were conveniently labeled “Pipes” and were easily removed to check the piping beneath.