Pulling together an accessible bathroom makeover in five days certainly wasn’t easy, but that’s what a couple of HANDY staffers did one week ago. In between days of demo, tiling, working with plumbers, widening a doorway, patching walls and much more, HANDY’s art director Mike Anderson shot magazine-quality photos and I wrote story points, submitted Facebook updates and composed this blog entry about how we created our wheelchair accessible bathroom.

It’s true that there’s much more involved with an intensive project such as a bathroom redo than what we’re able to show in the magazine, so we wanted to use this blog entry as an opportunity to give you a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes of this HANDY accessible bathroom project.
 

We don’t usually take photos of the demo process, as it’s pretty self-explanatory, but most of you know that it can be a time-consuming, dirty part of a project. Here, HANDY’s art director Mike Anderson has set down his camera to take a handful of drywall scraps to the Bagster (a wonderful alternative to renting a dumpster for construction waste.)

Mike Anderson does a wonderful job of capturing how-to photos as they happen. This one will illustrate the process of laying tile; it took a few tries to get the lighting just right in such a small bathroom.

A large project like this requires many trips to and from an outdoor work station. Here, our plumbers haul in a piece of the Delta Traditional Shower System with zero-threshold base, which was stored in the homeowner’s garage for about a week before the project began.

One thing that makes HANDY unique is that we editors and art directors don’t just sit on the sidelines during projects. We do much (if not most) of the work ourselves—just like our readers. This photo shows Mike Anderson patching drywall around the new shower system. A few long nights and some sore muscles are well worth the reward of a successful project. Then it’s on to writing and designing the magazine article!