During my week away I’ve been struggling with what to do with the floor. It’s been nagging me in the back of my mind that the plywood substrate I’m working from is not sufficient for tiling. It started with feeling some bounce in the floor as I’ve been walking on. Then noticing the dips near the tub area and culminating with the lumpy NobleSeal membrane. I was hoping that adding some screws to the floor would address any bounciness, but I was still hearing squeaks when I left last time. The patching compound didn’t do a great job leveling things and of course the NobleSeal was kind of a disaster with not rolling out correctly. All this added up to worry that starting tiling would be a bad move. I posted up some questions on various forums and the consensus was that if I didn’t have a flat surface, I’d be asking for trouble. Also people asked if I had applied the NobleSeal over Luan plywood which I denied, but then I was second-guessing if I really checked the thickness of the plywood. I thought it was 1/2”? So after a week of reading up on tiling again, I realize that having a bad substrate is a recipe for disaster. So out comes all of the NobleSeal, patching compound, and plywood.

As I start ripping off the NobleSeal and get some of the plywood up, I see I made the right decision because the plywood is not exterior grade, but instead is the 1/4” Luan plywood. There’s no way the tile would have had a good substrate with this type of plywood.

As I get the plywood up I see the floor is divided into 2 parts. 1 part is the original wood floors with 2 layers of linoleum tiles. The 2nd part of the floor near the toilet is plywood with the original wood floors cut out. Maybe there was a toilet overflow at some time that rotted out the original floor.

After the floor’s out and my hand is all blistered I move to trying out some wood repairs using epoxy. I’ve seen the Abatron wood repair kit advertised in Old House Journal and in the craftsmanblog.com. I have some wood in the built-in that appears to be rotted. It’s black and crumbly. It’s focused mostly around the hinges so I want to reinforce this area before reattaching the doors. I scrape out the rotted wood and then apply the wood hardener.

I mix up the 2 part epoxy and then press that into the rotted wood.

I get roughly shaped and then leave to cure. Next week I’ll sand it down and try staining it to blend in with the existing wood. Next up is removing the last tub leg and getting that stripped of paint and rust. I’ve done a few passes of paint remover on the leg so I’m finally able to knock it off the gummed up bracket with a mallet.

I first give it a 6 our simmer in the crockpot with dish detergent and some baking soda. After that I strip off as much of the white paint as possible.

After getting most of the white off, I dunk in a rust remover bath for another 6 hours. This leads to a pretty clean leg with most of the white paint and rust removed.

The last step is to give the iron a coat of iron oxide paint to hopefully protect against rust. If this looks OK I’ll hit the other 3 legs next week and then I’ll have primed iron ready for the final color.