The Saga of the Wood Paneled Shower - Part I

I love Rehab Addict, the show on DIY Network (and Thursday nights on HGTV) that details Designer/Real Estate Agent/Restoration Expert Nicole Curtis’s journeys through restoring houses like mine to what they once were.  


To get to the good parts though, you’ve got to get through the rougher ones. In my case, that means demoing the vast majority of a bathroom. It turns out that isn’t nearly as fun or therapeutic as it looks on TV.


Let’s start with how this bathroom started when I bought the Isthmus House.

In my opinion, the worst of it was the wood paneling in the shower… and on the walls… and on the makeshift wall and “seat” between the shower and the toilet. And no exhaust fan. Did I mention that among all that wood there was also a window in the shower? Or that the 60s ceiling tiles (please, don’t be asbestos), trim and grass cloth wallpaper were still intact?

This is how it looked when I started. You can see a bit of the paneling under the window on the left.

I started by trying to pry off the paneling from inside the shower because I assumed there was mold immediately behind it. Turns out, the wood paneling was new and had been recently nailed and glued down. To get the paneling off, I had to chisel between the panels to get a claw-hold before prying.

After prying off the paneling, I was pleasantly surprised that there was new cement board underneath and no apparent signs of mold or mildew despite it being obvious no one had even tried to waterproof. Reread my “before” paragraph above and you’ll understand my surprise. Feeling relieved, I took down some plaster above the window to see if any moisture had gotten around the edges and into the walls.

Here’s a pic of the newly exposed lath by the window in the shower. You can see the edges of the new cement board underneath as well as some of the paneling. Both were silicone'd in. 

I had to go on a business trip the next day so I let it go for a week or so while I worked on some other things around the house before digging back in.

This past Sunday, when The Roommate was gone for a bit, I decided that the rest of the bathroom should come down and out while I could make plenty of noise. Back on went the respirator, safety glasses and gloves and out came the plastic to protect the rest of the room along with my claw, hammer and screwdriver.

I got through some more plaster and taking down the towel racks when I realized that the pieces of paneling I was removing along the wall adjacent to the shower were coming out awfully easily and seemed kind of soft. If you just said “oh, no,” you guessed it. Water had been seeping from the edge of the tub into the wall and wicking along the drywall that had been installed creating mold and plenty of it.

Since I was wearing a mold-grade respirator and was well-protected (and The Roommate wasn’t coming home for a while), I kept pulling. And pulling and pulling. There was mold under the drywall and that brand new cement board and well embedded in the wall and lath. It went all the way into the beams and through the wall to the lath on the kitchen side.

After assessing the damage and coming to the conclusion that this had seemingly been covered up by whoever had done the work, I called a local company and asked them to come out for a consultation for remediation services before I could leave on yet another business trip. While they made it out for the consult, I learned that the middle of June is the busiest time of year for them so I’ll be waiting until next week for them to come out to take care of this mess to the tune of a cool thousand bucks. For reference purposes, that’s about equal to the entire tile budget that includes a marble basket weave floor.

I figure there are a couple of lessons learned here and a couple of reminders worth noting.

1.   It is not okay for anyone to cover up things that can affect a future resident’s health. This includes black mold and potential structural damage.

2.   If at first you don’t see mold when you expect it, keep looking until all potentially affected surfaces are checked.

3.   It doesn’t matter if building code says you don’t need an exhaust fan in the bathroom because there’s a window. No one opens a bathroom window after a shower in January in Wisconsin. Install an exhaust fan – and don’t vent it to your attic.

4.   Your contingency fund matters. I put aside a little more than 20% contingency in the budget for this bathroom for when issues came up. They did and I’m glad to have “planned” for the just-in-case.
5.   You never know exactly what's behind your walls until you open them. I found this little surprise! Looks like the workers might have left it in the 40s or so!

This is the part where the road bumps happen but we get through them so that y’all can see my new bathroom within the next few weeks. More on the saga of the soon-to-be-clean bathroom to come!