The Bathroom.

It's where you get clean. It's the last room you see before you sleep. It's usually the first room you see in the morning. We've been told that the average person can spend up to 3 years in the bathroom during his or her lifetime. We've also been told that if you have a BlackBerry with BrickBreaker on it, that could actually be more like 5 years. But that's a discussion for a different blog.

This is where we get clean:

Our house was built in 1952, and you can really see it in the bathroom. Okay, so you can really see it all over, but we decided to start in the "water closet," as they say in every other English-speaking country. We know that because we're smart.

Here's the shower:

As you can see, it works, but it's not going to sell our house any faster.

And you know what TeamHarris does with rooms that won't sell? That's right, we beat the hell out of them with hammers!

There, that's better:

Okay, so that really took a day. Okay, 2 days. Here's what you can expect when you demolish a bathroom:

1. There's a lot of dust. It gets in your eyes, mouth and lungs and it tastes like a heap of boiled rubber bands wrapped in aluminum foil.

2. There's a lot of debris (see below). It piles up way faster than you can get it out. 15 minutes of banging on things equals roughly 30 minutes of shoveling stuff.

3. Underneath the tile there's this mesh stuff, which if you're on the receiving end of, you'll end up looking like the unfortunate product of a confrontation with a blood-thirsty badger. Wear sleeves.

4. If said bathroom is your one-and-only bathroom, be prepared for what a total pain in the posterior it is to remove and replace the commode every day.

5. Have every tool you own handy. The dining room table makes a GREAT place to lay them out.*

*denotes sarcasm

So, with day 2 out of the way...

... it was time to start on the floor. Here are the fruits of our first attack:

I have a message for all those people who told us "Oh yeah, the tile should just chip right off!"

In reality, which is apparently not where all those people live, the tile is supported by about 2 inches of concrete, followed by that annoying mesh, followed by waterproof sheathing, followed by the subfloor. In other words, it took us about 45 minutes with a sledge hammer to break up roughly 6 square inches of floor.

It was time for drastic measures:

We asked Otis if he would chew on the floor for a while, in hopes that he could break it up faster that we could. After all, he chews on everything else, right? Right. Just ask our garden hose. But he was busy barking at squirrels the next day, so we called in the big guns. A trip to Home Depot with Spencer for a jackhammer.

We had the floor out within 2 hours. It was AWESOME. Only one question now - Where does the toilet go when there's no floor?

The answer: Nowhere. Time to build a floor. By the end of day 3 it looked like this:

And at the end of day 3, since it was New Year's Eve we looked like this:

On the 4th day, we rested and saw movies. That was a good feeling. Getting out of that room felt like the last scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, when all the kids run out of their prison in the mine, arms over their eyes because they haven't seen the sun in years. Remember that? Didn't think so.

P.S. If you're ever feeling TOO manly from a day of jackhammering, we know of a great movie to lasso you by the testosterone and jerk you back into sensitivity:

Sit tight... More to come!