What Demolition Uncovers in Riverside Bathrooms

Every bathroom hides something until the tile and the tub are out of it. The posts kept by bath remodel riverside inside michigan politics (a running set of notes on bathroom work in Riverside, CA) all begin at that point, because the plan for a remodel is only a draft until the walls are open.

The first hour after the tub leaves

Once the tub is out, the wall behind it shows the history of the house. Many Riverside homes from the postwar tract years near Fairmount Park carry galvanized or early copper supply lines, and the framing around a tub often shows a brown tide line where a slow leak has wet the same studs for years. The crew probes the bottom plate with a screwdriver. Wood that takes the tip a half inch deep is rotted, and wood that stays hard is not.

Old shower pans and what they were made of

Older tile showers were built on a pan of tar paper and hot mop, or a sheet liner folded into the corners. Those liners crack where they were pinched at the curb, and water runs sideways into the subfloor long before a stain shows on the ceiling below. When the tile comes off, the mortar bed underneath is usually saturated. A new shower pan, or a bonded membrane over cement board, replaces all of it. Nothing about the old bed is reused.

Rot, mold and the subfloor

Water that gets past a failed liner tends to travel down. The subfloor beside the tub, under the vanity and around the toilet flange gets pressed with a boot heel and probed. Soft sheathing is cut out back to the nearest sound joist and replaced. Dark growth on the back of drywall is photographed, cut back past the visible edge and bagged, and the framing behind it is dried before anything closes. Dry weather around the Santa Ana River does not change this, because the moisture comes from inside the wall, not from the air outside.

How each finding changes the plan

A sound wall means the new waterproofing goes on as drawn. A rotted plate means framing repair, a new membrane behind the tile and a longer schedule. A seized shut-off valve gets replaced while the wall is open, since the labour is already spent getting to it. A brittle supply line gets swapped for new pipe. Findings are written down as they appear, so the work order matches what is actually inside the wall, and the inspection happens with the studs still visible.