Log Home Master Bathroom Renovation | How to Reinforce a Wall | One Room Challenge

We made a little bit of progress on our One Room Challenge project this week. We have most of the demo done. Now we have to start sorting out what we have uncovered and rebuilding!

Welcome to our One Room Challenge Spring 2021 project, our master bathroom. If you missed our introduction to this project last week, you can find it here.

I have to admit, I have no pretty pictures to share this week. This week was all about reinforcing the structure and the utilities.

As you can tell, we live in a log home. Everything about renovating a log home is a little more challenging than a normal stick built house.

The biggest issue we tackled is the wall separating our bathroom from the bedroom. In this picture, it's the wall on the left. The peak is about 15' high. We took down the dropped ceiling because we knew there was a gorgeous original wood tongue and groove ceiling and hand hewn beams above it.

(that LED strip lighting is just installed temporarily as our work lights)

What we didn't count on was the ceiling joist structure of the dropped ceiling was actually what connected and held together the top and bottom sections of the 15' wall.

So before we cut the ceiling joists out to clear the original ceiling completely, we needed to reinforce the wall. The top and bottom sections of wall needed to be connected solidly.

So here's what we did:

We used pieces of reclaimed 4x4 lumber to brace and support the top section and the bottom section of the wall. We pre-drilled a hole through the footer of the top section, then through the header of the bottom section.

We also pre-drilled the 4x4 and then lined them up and ran threaded rod through all of it. Nuts and a washer on the top and bottom of the threaded rod kept them tight and in place.

We did this approximately 93 times along the wall. I'm kidding! But Mike is no joke when it comes to building things solidly.

We also started sorting out all of the electrical. All of the wiring comes up from the basement. When we removed the ceiling, we discovered that instead of coming up from the basement and straight to the outlets, for some reason the wires ran up from the basement, up above the dropped ceiling, and then back down to the outlets.

It took forever to trace all of the wires out.

So Mike has been pulling the wires down and rewiring the outlets.

We also discovered all of these bare wires hanging down from the original ceiling. I wish I knew what the original owners had in mind with these. They aren't centered in the sections between the beams, so it will be a challenge but I'm planning on using them for lots of new lighting!