So, I thought I'd return to writing a little bit about some of the work we have done on the house. The bathroom, was a big job and brought with it many problems!!
A room in this house had been made into two small offices, and as it was partition walls we thought it perfect for knocking back into one room and having it as a bathroom. It was a good location - upstairs in the middle of the house....here is the floor plan showing how it was before...
So, as you can see we needed to take out the walls in the middle of the room. Which also happened to have a radiator on each side - so first we had to get those off the walls!
Below are the two offices - and the doors between them that we also had to remove...
We removed these walls with a week of moving in! Adam and Paul came and helped, and it was a lot more difficult than we had anticipated! The wood holding up the walls, which the plasterboard was attached to - did not want to come out!! and the mess from the plasterboard was awful! The waste we had to get rid of too - seemed to triple in size as we took it out! Plus we couldn't put plasterboard in the tip - we needed special bags which we had to pay for - they were huge and I thought 2 would be enough. It wasn't!
You can see below how awful and dusty it was! This is my crazy husband Andy and my son Adam.
This was the first real look we got of it as one big room rather than two offices!
Tidied up it looked good!
I still had all the woodchip to get off the walls - and it needed plastering - it still had office lights and plug sockets...
So, the plumbers were already about - they saw it as two offices on the Friday when they went home and they came back to it looking like the pic above on the Monday!
I had designed how I wanted the bathroom - it looked something like this: (pic to go in)
So...the plumbers started lifting floorboards etc. and then they hit me with it - we can't do the bathroom in here! They said that there was a massive steel running right across the middle of the floor meaning that they could not run pipes across. Furthermore - because the house is extended further out on the floor below - all the waste pipes had to leave the room in the far corner and they would not be able to get the pipes at an angle so that the water/waste would run down it. Panic, disappointment, worry about the planning permission we'd need to change room...and what other room would it go in?? We scoped the house for other options - pulling up floor boards etc. Eventually they said - if we raised the floor, we could get over the steel thing, and get the angles they needed. So I searched for somebody who could do this for us - and £1,000 and a week later - we had a raised floor!
During this time I also stripped off a ton of woodchip wallpaper (the plasterer had provided me with a young lad - cheap labour to help, as at the time I was also stripping wallpaper off our bedroom wall), and I had all the walls plastered. When I tried to get the wallpaper off the ceiling - it started to come apart, so we had to put in a new ceiling and get that plastered too!! All of which was more expense we didn't expect. Before the bathroom could go in - I needed to tile too. I had done a tiling course whilst we were waiting to buy the house and I was very nervous about tiling it myself - my first attempt!!
I tiled an area where the sinks were going - and I really struggled because the wall was not flat - despite having been plastered.
Then I realised that there was no way I could tile around where the shower would be, because it was going up higher and the wall was so bendy!! I ended up getting the plasterer back to straighten the wall. They did not do a perfect job. I was stressing so much that Paul agreed to come and help me - and between us - I think we did a good job!!
Then...I had to paint, and get the flooring in - before we could finish getting the bathroom fitted. I think it was already October and we'd started this in June! I was desperate for this bathroom! I was so excited because I knew it would be awesome when finished!!
Here it is painted...you can also see the raised floor and the taps ready for the bath...
I cannot seem to find any pics of the floor going in - but I must have some - so will add them if I ever find them!! But it is Amtico, and is a pale grey wood type....thing...very nice!
The next thing that happened is that the whole bathroom went in - apart from the shower because we had so many problems with missing parts. Victoria Plum - have a lot to answer for - that and they sent me two sink pedestals that were all bendy and they looked nothing alike when stood together. The replacements they sent were all smashed - and eventually they checked everything and sent them specially packed etc. Took a LOT of time and stress to get this sorted and even more so with the shower!
So - the end result (I cant show the whole thing in one pic unfortunately - too many weird angles), and you get to see the new floor here too.....drum roll......
If you go back and compare these to the two offices, or the wall coming down, it makes you (me) realise just what we achieved. These pics don't actually do it justice. It definitely has the wow factor!
