After the demo and tearing out the floor, we realized that with all the little tweaks we were making to fixture locations, (moving the toilet over a couple inches, changing the shower from left handed to right, and adding a second sink to the vanity), it was easier to tear out the old plumbing and put all new in.
We chose to update everything with PEX and PVC piping, and it was pretty easy for Mike to cut all the pieces, put in place, and glue everything together. He finished all the plumbing in two nights, working after he got home from work. It would have taken him one night, but he was short a pex plug and tee, so he wasn't able to hook everything up to the water line until a quick trip to Home Depot on the second night.
Replacing everything also allowed him to properly install everything within the floor joists and to fix the hot mess the previous owner's left us. Here's what it looked like when we started to tear out the flooring. Notice how the shower water lines (on the far right) are right in the middle of the floor joist. They cut a huge piece out of that joist and giant notches along the other ones.
Mike removed everything and added supports to the joists and added the PEX and PVC piping to the new shower fixture position. He also replaced the old cast iron toilet drain pipe and flange with a PVC one. This is because it's easier than retro-fitting it when we moved it a couple inches over, and it's more difficult to connect cast iron to PVC, so we replaced everything. He also added more supports around the toilet.
Obviously, you can see that it was necessary to remove the flooring to easily replace everything, but it was a pain in the butt working on floor joists the entire time. It was like playing the lava game as a child, except instead of stepping on the carpet and pretend melting in the lava, stepping off of one of the joists meant a foot through the kitchen ceiling. Needless to say, Mike was the one doing most of the work up to this point.
He also fed the water lines over to the new sinks and easily fit those in the joist bays.
After all the plumbing was installed we turned the water off and hooked up everything. Very excited to say we had no leaks and everything is tied in now. Mike was so excited to finally have everything "underground" that he installed the plywood subflooring the next day and has already started framing and laying out where everything is going. I'll be back soon to share what the room looks like with the framing and flooring in, and all of the electrical rough-ins.
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