Removing the elephant in the room.

Goal #11 of our 2013 goals is “convert the upper sunroom into a dining room”.  At least 90% of the work involved in this project is the removal of the hot tub that currently dominates the room.  “Remove the hot tub”, you say?  Yes.  Perhaps it sounds nice to have a hot tub, but this one is ugly (and visible from all over the main level of the house), noisy, and sucks power.  And we don’t want to use it even half as much as we’d need to make keeping it worthwhile.

This is the space that will be the dining room, as it was after we moved in.  This picture is taken from the boundary between the living room and the dining room.  Great light, beautiful views, but the tub is hardly a subtle presence:

 Looking back the other way you can see how much of this (fairly large) room it occupies. (The cabinet against the far wall in this shot is only temporarily here, in order to make room for the christmas tree.)

Perhaps worst of all, this is oddly right outside our bedroom,

so I see the side of the tub instead of the woods when I wake up in the morning.  (If you’re counting, yes, this is the second post concerned with my morning view. 😉   So be it.)

So, that’s it — the tub goes.

Here’s how we did it:

Step Zero: Cut off the power.  Verify.  Check again.  Test.  Make sure.  A lot of juice runs to this thing, and, well, water.

Step One: Drain water.  First we drained the main part of the tub by just hooking up a hose to the drain pipe and letting gravity pull it into the valley.  That still left a good few inches in the bottom, which we revoved with a submersible pump my parents let us borrow.  That still left a few gallons in shallow puddles here and there, which we bailed by hand.  It’s not possible to get it all, but we did our best:

Step two: Seal off the room as best you can (we taped plastic over the spiral stairs in the corner).   We’ve seen some instructional videos on this.

Step Three: Gather tools.  The most important were a Saws-All, good masks (fiberglass!), and lots of towels for the bits of water that will be trapped in the tubes – not tons but way too much to just let lay around.

Step Four: Start sawing:

Step Five: Pull apart the pieces  and make a huge mess

Step Six: (The next day) snowblow massive amounts of snow off the deck so that you can get the pieces out of the sunroom and over to the ever-growing junk pile that waits for a dumpster in spring.

 

Step Seven: Celebrate that the elephant has left the room.

and get ready to cut out the damaged tile where the electrical ran to the tub and to replace and regrout a new tile in its place.