Updated 2-11-23
Phil takes out a garden tub, and shower in a mobile home bathroom remodel. He also goes over some of the plumbing you need to know about.
⏱️⏱️Chapters⏱️⏱️
00:00 Intro
00:12 Horrible weather
00:43 Today we are remodeling a bathroom, what all we are doing
03:05 What we are doing to the other bathroom
04:00 Pulling out the garden tub
04:38 Trick to get out a stripped screw
05:35 You have screws into the studs to hold it
06:00 If we wanted to save the tub, we would disconnect it.
07:00 Tearing down the wall around the tub
07:55 Mechanical vent we’ll need to cut and cap it
08:15 Pulling the door off because we’re replacing it, anyway
09:20 Pulled the garden tub out
09:50 Taking the stand in shower out
10:10 How bathroom showers are in mobile homes
11:00 How you get into the shower
11:30 The shower plumbing
12:27 How a factory mobile home faucet differs from a house type
13:15 This is why you see mobile home showerheads that are messed up
13:55 Types of pipes, quest and pex
15:30 Why we don’t use plastic fittings
16:20 Only issues we have had with pex or quest pipes
16:52 They wanted to replace the cabinet
17:21 Cobalt Pex Cutters
18:00 Removing the sink trap nasty
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Well, better be glad you haven’t been with us in the last few week or two. We’ve had -21 degree temperatures and we have busted pipes to fix. And that’s all we’ve been doing. We’re doing 12 to 16 hours a day crawling underneath houses that are soaking wet, particularly the guy who’s running the camera, fixing water heaters, everything. And terrible temperatures. I should have took you along with it.
I’ll have to do that at some point, how to fix your own water heater, probably quite a few other things to show you. But what we’re doing today and for the rest of this week and maybe part of the next is remodel this bathroom. The problems they have with this bathroom is they don’t like the location of this older, dull, yellow looking shower that has a busted bottom.
And they don’t use the garden tub, which the garden time takes more than a water heater to fill. So it’s just for looks. So we’re going to take this garden tub out and we’ll cut it in pieces and then we’ll put the shower that they’re going to purchase and put it into this way or this way, whichever way they want.
We’re going to take the batten strips off to the wall, nail down the nails. We’re going to finish the drywall and we’re going to texture all these walls and paint them now because of, they were taking this wall out. So we’ll have to take out some of the plumbing, rearrange the drain over here. I haven’t heard yet what they want to do about this cabinet or if I have heard it’s been a month.
So, we’re going to kind of have to wait till I hear. You know, we’re going to take this doorway out building, and it’ll be three-inch drywall because most drywall in these things are not half inch. They are 3/8. You can do with half inch, but you have such a wood back, and/or you have to finish way far. You’ll always show a lot more. So we will do the same on this side to repair that area there. But because this is wallpaper covered, we can’t match that coat that pattern.
We’ll end up taking all the battleships off in this area all the way to here. We’ll texture and paint all this area. So then we got another bathroom after which they’ve already started by putting in a new cabinet and new flooring looks like a new toilet and a new bathtub. The bathtub trim around that it should have been inside the drywall, normally would put drywall over the top of that and then we can make it look real smooth.
We’ll put a PVC trim around that so it doesn’t look so bad. So all this would be textured and painted also means it has a hole this should have caught. But these flimsy doors bend, now all this, it’s working. So we just had must happened before that was there.
“Before the put the door.”
Everything was. So that’s what we’re doing. All right. So he knows the screws here that hold supposed to hold. It’s stripped. Sorta. ah, a broken tip on top of that. Okay. Well, I should have four or five of those. We took our. Right. So all these screws you strip out, that’s not always the case, but at least partially a screwdriver or something. You can hold up to it and you see there’s a lot around bathtubs is a quick way to run water. It should have had a sealant right there but dresses up this edge. What the factory did. And they don’t have to be. Terribly tight against the wall. They can cover over a pretty good sized gap.
Ok, and then they have a screw, right here, into a stud holding it. Another one over here. And one right here.
If I was concerned about saving this tub, and putting it back or something, I would go underneath and pull the drain out and take this panel here off, which we will do and disconnect it and then lift it out. But I’m not interested in saying this. Nobody want to harvest gold tub and or it’s not really harvest gold it’s just a light yellow. See this is the original color faded to a darker color but nobody wants it so I’m going to cut it up in pieces. This garden type arrangement is just not up to par in, over any other thing. So we will cut this thing in pieces and that means I will tear out the wall around it. And that’s what we’re doing next. Normally, you’d have to get a prybar and mess around with it, but it’s not really built real strong.
So I’m going to. Pull it up. And make it. Usually it’s held on by screws, that’s why it’s scratching the wall there, but I’m going to be fixed and all that, so we’ll pry bar that up. Looks like they got mechanical vent there. We won’t need that we’ll have to go underneath and cut it, and cap it. You might use the mechanical vent inside a wall, but I want to be careful about doing that because not want to go to the roof because I just put a brand new roof on.
So we’re going to go back and forth through this doorway. So I’m going to take the door out just going out anyway. We can get all this stuff out, so, we can work here. So we pulled the garden tub out. It was we could have cut in pieces, but it will literally turn on edge and walk it out. Cut the drain, cut the two supply lines. And it came right out. Of course, you saw me take the wall off. It’s really not difficult. Yeah. If you want to protect your flooring, you’re not going to want to anyway, because you’re not going to put something back in the same place.
This the same size. You don’t have to change your flooring. And now we’re taking the stand in shower out. It’s just all the same thing as a whirlpool. I mean, the garden tub, it’s screws that holds a trim. And then the surround itself is fastened to the walls with screws and we pulled that. The a lot of times people don’t know the a lot of bath, bathroom shower in mobile homes.
They have, ah, this part right here. This thread is threaded and you have to unscrew that and pull it back. And then there’s a nut here that tightens it to the drywall. So there’s nothing in there but the drywall to support it, that’s why you see this all wallered out like that. In this case, the water is already off and somebody had it all loose.
So that’s why it was flopping all around, because it fell and some hang in here. This is looks like the original shower head to uh, mobile home spin off, but anyway we’ll be taking this loose and then on the backside. That’s how you to get into this shower. Looks like it’s got a screw right there. To get into the guts of it. Probably can use this to patch up this drywall in here.
So, If you’ll pan around here, it has the hot water here and the cold water there. And you can tell where I fixed a long time ago. Put in pex. It was a busted line, in here. So we’ll take these loose this loose and pull this out and probably, let’s see, try this with a Harbor freight pair of channel locks and see how they do.
We have to leave a one or two under a house here and there, shouldn’t, but we do. So this is a good example of how the shower works and it does not have. You could probably put a little bit of thin wood. It could not be a one by four, I don’t believe, because it’s got a hold here. And then this sits up against the drywall and then that tightens, right?
Like so then you hook your water onto a here. Where as a regular what they call a drop-ear elbow has two screws and you put the wood behind it and then the water comes into the bottom of that elbow that has a place for the shower head to fasten too, that, of course, drop-eared elbow has these screw holes where you can screw to that two by four or such and that keeps that showerhead solid, not depending on the drywall.
And that’s why a lot of times you’ll see in mobile homes the drywall be all tore up around this. And that’s why it’s, it’s depending on the strength of the drywall, which is not very strong. So if you run into that, that’s what you’re dealing with. You want to bring this up, maybe cut that right here and then put a pex, dropped-ear elbow and put a piece of wood in all that kind of stuff and then you can have it supported and then replace the drywall. So that can be something that people don’t know about their shower and, shower head and how it works. I’ll show you the difference. What this is, is a quest pipe. It’s gray in color. There’s another version that’s black.
There was actually a class action lawsuit to replace all this because of some concerned flaw, but they’re actually done with a lot of them are done with copper fittings and sometimes they have a great big gray quest fitting, which is a twist together. And I’ll have to show you guys how that works. If you ever have to take one apart, put it back together.
But in reality, they were pretty good and they are pretty good and I know that plumbers are going to go nuts about it. But I’m telling you, these things will take a freeze and come back. Take a freeze and come back. Take a freeze and come back now. This is Quest and this is new pex, I believe this will be pex a, you notice it’s just marginally bigger.
Okay. This also will take a freeze and come back the pipe itself. Now I use brass fittings. This is a actually from a mobile manufacturer. This is a brass fitting from the mobile home manufacturer. A lot of plumbers, including Master plumbers, they use plastic elbows and plastic. And these all that works well. I honestly don’t believe in them. I think they’re cool and everything and you save money quite a lot of money.
But I don’t I don’t do that. So when I when I use if I replace, if I am by the way, if you go to put pex on to Quest, Quest will need two crimp rings. And I don’t again, I don’t use copper, I use stainless steel, and I can get to crimp rings on that barbed fitting that I might put this connecting pex into it or not coupling up to it.
So if you get ready to do that, quest is still very acceptable. You wouldn’t want to throw away everything. And again, I’m telling you, it’s just a marginal difference in thickness. And I’m telling you, I’ve seen them where they’re froze up and what busted is the faucet or the toilet or, you know, something connected to this. This is the only issues I’ve ever seen with either one of these is that mice will go to chewing on these just for maybe this is cold or it’s hot and they chew on it and then you end up with a leak in the middle of your living room floor.
You’re like, How in the world I get a leak? There is no connection. Straight pipe from the bathroom to the kitchen. Well, they can chew on this just to get a flavor or something and it will spray water. So I’ve had to fix a bunch of it, but Quest Pipe. All right, um, they decided they want to replace this cabinet, which I don’t blame them we took out the tub.
We cut it up in three pieces. About 16 inches are all the way across the bottom and then down the middle in the back. That way we get it through the doorways. Generally, they set those things in place and then they build walls around them. That’s why you see the showers and everything the way they are, the faucets and all that. But anyway, these are the new cobalt that Lowe’s sells pex cutters, actually work pretty good.
00:17:31:02 – 00:18:00:27
Speaker 1
You can tell they’ve been muddy. So, Christine, you might want to know this is a good buy for a pex cutter. None of them last very long. They get dull, but I like it. It has a lock and you can keep it locked with nobody ever uses. But it works really well even on Quest, which quest is thinner.
All right. Now, we’re going to take the trap off, hopefully not too nasty in there, always is nasty though already got that nasty smell. Ooh somebody’s pissed in there. Maybe they did. Oh, oh yeah, somebody pissed in the sink, this is so much fun. All right, I got no water to wash my hand. How untactful is that? Pissing in the sink? It smells terrible? Anyway, I’m going to I got a four pound sledge.
Oh bad smell.
“So when we go to eat you better wash your hands?”
Nothing. Is that good? It’s just rubbery. Bad times for whoever did that. What I wish on them.
I’m going to.