Day Sixteen: We're firing on all cylinders now

The guys have been busy at it for a couple days and making progress on all sorts of fronts. With so many jobs to be done, this has turned into a blessing because it means not much time waiting for something to set or to dry. Here's the latest on all the projects underway.

The upstairs bathroom continues along. The grout is in the floor, so we're committed to this style now. It's a good thing we like it. One of the guys was particularly proud of his painstaking work carving the perfect shape for the soap dish out of one of the tiles. How he did that without cracking the tile we'll never know.

Lack of paint for the bathroom and vanity are holding up this job, so the guys have started demolition of the downstairs bathroom. They're leaving the toilet and sink down there (for obvious reasons) but have uncovered quite a bit.

First, here's what the bathrooms started as. Yes, that's the tub. Now we like nostalgia as much as the next person, but we're not quite into Smurf blue, Garfield orange, Big Bird yellow, or Kermit green.

And here's where things stand now:

• the waste pipe from the upstairs bath

• some water damage to wood behind the tub fixtures

• the wall that separates the bath from the furnace room

• the hole that used to house the exhaust fan

And we have the vanity all ready once this project gets further along.

Not satisfied with all this, the guys have moved onto a couple of smaller, but far messier and heavier jobs.

They tore up the linoleum floor in the laundry room and will be replacing it with a really neat tile we found at Home Depot. Trust us that the tile will far exceed the dingy cement floor that is pictured below. No one ever said a laundry room had to look like a dungeon cell.

This was the laundry room before the demolition:

Finally, the guys also began dismantling a nearly 30-year-old wood burning stove that was the primary heat source for both the previous owner and the one before him (a neighbor confirmed this and said the prior owner would stoke the stove before leaving for work in the morning, that seems like a fire hazard to us). With our new furnace there's no need for this creosote-spewing bad boy. Free to a new owner with a strong back or a half-dozen close friends.

Here's what it used to look like:

And here's what it and the access to the chimney look like now: