destruction is complete!
woohoo! the destruction phase is now complete. we ripped out the bathroom sink, the skanky-ass toilet, the 300-pound utility sink, the kitchen cooktop and oven, and a whole bunch of other odds and ends. al came over to fetch most of his masonry stuff and grab some of our unwanted copper and aluminum to take off and recycle. i am still amazed at how quickly one can fill up a dumpster.
i brought my dehumidifier over to the house last night. the basement is extremely damp, a combination of the humidity and the fact that water has been tossed everywhere during the tile removal and all that. wet footprints would stay wet for hours and hours and wet areas of the floor were staying like that for days. over the course of 12 hours, the dehumidifier sucked up about 2 gallons of water. it would've gotten even more had the tank not filled up. i emptied it again today and it's been running non-stop and the floors are finally drying up.
the bathroom is still smelling skanky. i found in the course of removing the toilet that it wasn't actually bolted to the floor. looked like the only thing holding it in place was residual glue from long-gone flooring. i have rags in all the exposed drains except for the shower drain--hopefully this will be sufficient until we install the new fixtures. once the floor finishes drying, i'm going to sweep up the rest of the debris and give this whole area a good cleaning to see if that helps with the odor. but i still need to see about sealing off the old shower drain, plus i need to have the drain pipe coming down from the kitchen above checked out--it's looking rather funky right around the floor area. part of me wonders whether we shouldn't have all the DWV assemblies checked out just to make sure there aren't any problems or vent clogging or anything like that.