Done, finished, complete!

Yes, it can only be the bathroom!

While we knew we were going to be squeezing a lot of this work in around the rest of life, I don't think either of us predicted it would take three and a half months! To be fair, most of the last month has been dealing with the things that didn't work first time. Finally though, we can say that it is finished. Finito. Done. Hooray!

First up though, a reminder of the "before" photos:

 

And now it looks like this:

Worktop with countertop sink and plenty of storage

Draining board for lots of bottles

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On going backwards and other such things

We realised, with great joy at the thought, that this weekend is the first of five weekends at home. That's five consecutive weekends with only a few bits and pieces in the diary. With a burst of enthusiasm we've made ourselves a list of projects we'd like to work on, almost certainly more than we'll get done - but its good to have aims in life!

First things first though, the bathroom. You may have noticed we've gone quiet on that one, and that's because the project has gone quiet - in fact with no help from us it's been going backwards. We've hit two snags...

Where the sink was....

The first is that around a week after rejoicing in the final fitting of the sink, we discovered that it was not to be the final fitting after all. A very slow leak appeared, coming from a manufacturing fault in the sink itself rather than our plumbing. This one has been really frustrating as plumbing leaks we can deal with (usually by applying a hefty dose of silicon sealant), but a flawed sink means it had to come out and be sent back for a replacement, damaging the finish on the worktop in the process.

Getting ready to refinish the scuffs and other damaged caused by removing the sink.

Our other set back is that the paint on the wall in one particular corner has started to react. Slowly but surely its been bubbling and peeling until we could ignore it no more.

Since the corner in question is the one nearest the bath and shower we debated if humidity was the problem. We stripped off the dodgy paint, made sure everything was dry and applied a fresh coat - and within a matter of minutes it started to bubble up again. Oh.

After the first coat of base coat the bubbliness was still coming through a little
- not very easy to photograph though!

Time to pull in the big boys. Over the course of the weekend we've applied several liberal coats of Base Coat by Polycell - the same people that make Polyfilla, which is supposed to seal in whatever is behind and allow you to paint your colour of choice over the top.  So far we seem to be winning - but we'll have to keep an eye on it.

So this weekend has been re-painting, re-varnishing and putting up the mirrored cabinet that arrived this week.

Forward progress at last - fixing the new medicine cabinet to the wall.

In other news, we've taken the old bath to the tip, revealing the lanky grass that's been hiding underneath it, and bonfired away some more of the bits that have been covering our patio. Oh and Lemon is having her first broody spell of the season - we had a couple of warmer days apparently and she was off, hunkering down in the coop at every possibly opportunity - eggs or no eggs. So starts the annual battle of wills....

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Refitting the Bathroom: 5. Two steps forward, one step back

A misleading title really since everything is part of the planned progress, but when you spend your Sunday evening undoing the work of a weekend it doesn't feel like it!

By the end of Saturday we'd got all the cabinets in position. Much chopping and sanding was needed to carefully shape each piece so that they all slotted together really well, but we got there in the end. We'd also cut the worktop into shape and could finally get a feel for how the finished bathroom was going to look. Seeing the wood of the worktop against the white of the tiles started to bring home how close we are to done.

After church on Sunday we cut holes in the worktop for both the sink and the tap and then sat those in position too. What do you think? From the start the counter-top sink has been one of the features we've been looking forward to and seeing it in position - even if not plumbed in - was a very exciting moment.

And then we had to take it all apart again! Our bathroom is now back to how it was a week ago and all the cupboard panels are down in the conservatory so that we can sort all the final details and get everything painted.

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Refitting the Bathroom 4. Shower

Another bathroom post, I hope you don't mind; our lives currently revolve around little else and so the blog will naturally do likewise for a while still.

Since I last posted the focus has been on tiling in the hope we'd have the main walls done before the sparky arrived to wire in our new shower on Tuesday morning. This was a close call that saw us grouting like mad on Monday evening, but we did get there.

Tiled and grouted walls

This shower is one of the rather exciting bits about our new setup, a gadget for the bathroom! In the old bathroom the shower was one of those "connected to the bath taps" jobs, except that the handle to switch from bath to shower had long since snapped off and a spanner lived on the bathroom windowsill for this purpose. Having seen so many of the bathtap/shower combos that have failed over time we decided to try something different.

Shower fittings on the wall all ready to go.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard we tried to rearrange things, the bath and consequently the shower needed to go in the same location as before - with the shower head on a rather thin and flimsy stud wall. Worried about the weight of sitting a classic electric shower there we've opted for a digital shower instead. Any excuse!

The main body of our shower, tucked snuggly out of the way.

With a digital shower the bulk of the unit sits tidily away under the bath with just a small outlet for the shower head required in our stud - hopefully much less strain on the wall. The shower is controlled by a remote unit which, in the case of the one we've chosen, is wireless (you can also get digital showers where the remote is connected by a long length of wire). This means it can sit anywhere in the bathroom with no worries about water flow and pipework.

The wireless shower controller

Getting the shower wired into our mains has been the only job we've employed someone to do (well that and soldering up our pipework mishap), and yesterday Andy came and sorted it out for us. We used Andy to help us sort out the electrics when we first bought the house and he did all that was needed yesterday with minimal fuss which was great. All we need to do now is silicon around the edge of the bath and we can have a shower!

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Refitting the Bathroom 3. We Will Rebuild!

One long weekend (and it felt very long!) and we've made some good progress on our bathroom project. Here's a quick whiz through of what we've achieved so far:

We finished gutting the place. The old suite was removed on Saturday and we stripped out the floor boards too. As I mentioned at the start, a rotting floor was one of the motivations for getting this project done - it was good to see it go.

Gutted...

We burst a pipe. Yes, you read that correctly! In getting the floor up we cut one of the pipes to the central heating system (the nearest pipe in the photo above) and so had the boiler off until the very kind plumber could come and solder it back together for us three days later. Oops! It turns out our pipes run so close to the floor boards that they touch which might explain why we get so many creaks and bangs as the heating warms up.

We laid new chip board, complete with drawings of where all the pipes are to stop some poor sod in the future making the same mistake. In the process we've also found that the joists are a medley of heights so there's no way the floor will ever be flat. Useful.

The toilet in a temporary setting while we sorted out the new floor boards

We replaced the toilet with its new "back to wall" counterpart. The cistern will be hidden inside one of the new cupboards once all is done.

We've tiled the wall behind where the bath is going. We figured this would be much easier without the bath in place. With a little more time we'd have tiled further but the deadline of going back to work was looming over us so...

First wall of new tiles all stuck in place

We fitted the new bath. By 10.30 the night before we went back to work we were both able to wash off all the plaster dust, tile adhesive and general dirt to become presentable again! We're feeling very grateful that we decided to use speedfit plumbing as Joe managed to get most of the fittings for the bath and shower together in about half an hour.


There's lots more to do yet, but it feels like we might be on the homeward stretch now - we're rebuilding rather than tearing down anyway. *Sigh of relief*

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Refitting the Bathroom 2. Painting and Tiling

Last weekend we rather excitedly made a start to our bathroom project. We've had to work out a fairly careful schedule that meant it was basically a functional bathroom for the majority of the build, and with that in mind this week we have:

... emptied the room of all the fixtures and fittings including the heated towel rail we had fitted a couple of years back. This is about the only thing we're hoping to reuse at the end of the project.

... removed all the tiles. We did this one in stages so that the bath/shower area was protected for as long as possible. By the end of Friday though we'd stripped them all out. Unfortunately some of the plaster board couldn't stand the abuse of yet another round of tile removal (we think we might be the third or fourth to attempt this) and we'll need to re-plaster this area before we put in the new bath or start tiling.

... painted the walls. The areas that wanted painting are, unsurprisingly, not overly close to all the plumbing work so we got this done last Sunday. The walls are now "green blue" which is a minty green colour, and hopefully once we've fitted the cupboards and new tiles we should have a nice neat painted edge.

... painted the gloss work. For the same reasons as above we got this one done early, we just need to be careful maneuvering the baths in and out!

So at the end of the week our bathroom was still all in place (sink aside), but ready for a long weekend to break the back of the task. Hopefully by the time we're back at work on Wednesday we'll have the new toilet and bath all fitted and maybe some tiles up too. That's plan A anyway....

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Refitting the Bathroom 1. Getting Organised

When we bought our house there was one job that was most definitely on the hit list right from the start: completely redoing the bathroom. There are many reasons for doing this, not least that the bath has leaked so many times that we're not sure how stable the floor is anymore, The current shell suite has certainly seen better days, and has a nasty habit of encouraging water to pool rather than drain nicely. The current layout has no real storage and all sorts of box sections to hide pipes that feel fairly bodged together.

In short we're stripping the whole lot out and starting again. We want something that feels fresh and clean, has plenty of storage and has a more modern feel to it. The room is just under a 2m square so there isn't much space to play with however we've got a plan that we think makes good use of the room:

So that's lots of new cupboards and a worktop that runs round the room
with a countertop sink, along with new toilet, bath and shower.
Oh and sorry the whole thing is so blindingly bright!

Its taken quite a bit of effort (and several years of stopping and starting) to get all our thoughts pinned down but we're finally there and at the end of last week we put in an order for most of the parts we're going to need. Joe's hoping to achieve most of it himself, with me as a sidekick (and a little bit of wiring from the electrician). Did I mention that this is the only bathroom - and only toilet - in the house so everything needs to stay fairly functional throughout the refit? Watch this space!

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