Surviving the installation of a new bathroom (ii) – guest post by AJLR

 

The start day for Bathroom Mayhem arrived, finally, the second week of April. We’d cleared out everything easily moveable (and there was a surprising amount of it). We removed the old bathroom cabinet from the wall and put it on the dining room table so I could spend a happy hour deciding what to keep and what to chuck from it*. I took a last look at all the old fittings and thanked them for their hard work. Then it was time to let the two destroying angels from the bathroom company get about their work.

One of the strange things I found about having a bathroom unavailable for use is how one finds one has been in the habit of using it for all sorts of things apart from the obvious. I find bathrooms foster contemplation, for some reason, so that quiet time was definitely gone for the moment. There’s also the handwashing of smalls, the ‘stare into the bathroom mirror because you definitely came in here for something’ state of being, the sorting area for laundry to be done, the daily removal of a cat from its playtime in the empty bath…

Day three of the fortnight was, we had thought, likely to be the worst. Everything was out/off/crunched and they’d started digging up the floor and burrowing into two of the walls. The floor hole kept growing as they worked back along the old pipework to where it needed to be cut out and the new run attached. I was strongly reminded of pruning back an old shrub, as I peered nervously round a corner from time to time.  The wall excavations were noisy but we knew that having opted for a new shape of radiator and having the shower in a different part of the room, then unless we’d gone for surface pipes that would have to be boxed in, it was inevitable. This way would end up much better in the long run. In the midst of all this, they made sure we still had a functioning loo. Mind you, the situation was somewhat inhibiting if one wanted to use it!

 

Old branches of pipework, to be pruned out and have new grafts fitted.

 

New radiator pipes, soon to be invisible.

 

On day four, the central heating people arrived and I found fairly quickly that day three wasn’t the worst. We’d warned them beforehand that they’d be working at the same time as the bathroom installers and had had the phone equivalent of a resigned shrug. I gather it happens with a fair amount of frequency. One thing in particular we’d wanted with the change in CH system was the ability to have the radiator on in the bathroom when we wanted, even when it was shut off for summer in the rest of the house. I hate soggy towels! So part of the CH pipework changes would be the installation of what they called a ‘summer and winter circuit’, which basically means that so long as the boiler comes on for hot water supplies, it will also heat up that bit of the CH piping that goes to the bathroom radiator/towel rack if you want it to. No more soggy towels on damp summer days. Anyway, day four and day five were hell. At one point we had six workmen in the house and they seemed to be regularly in every single room. There was nowhere quiet or undisturbed to escape to (apart from our local gym, where we’d been going for daily showers) and eventually I found myself barricaded into a corner of the sitting room, practically cowering behind a row of strategically placed indoor plants. I only came out to make further regular deliveries of tea, coffee, and biscuits to all those who looked as if they needed it. You would not believe the quantity of milk, sugar, coffee and tea we got through. I tried to cultivate a Zen-like attitude and concentrated on the fact that it would all be over soon. The cats were also deeply unimpressed although Tabbs, our elderly female tabby, was much better at coping than was the much younger male, Smudge. Tabbs would stroll up to one of the workmen and demand either a stroke or a crumb of biscuit. Smudge wouldn’t come in the house at all while they were there and as the temperature outside at the time was extremely chilly it meant that we made a day bed for him to retire to in the greenhouse.

All things end, eventually. At the end of day five, a Friday, we once more had a floor in the bathroom and the plasterers had been to re-do all the walls and the new ceiling. We also watched, fascinated, as a special rubberised cement was poured over the floor to set, ready for the flooring man to come on Saturday morning and work on a smooth surface. We’d decided to get rid of the skirting board in there and have a pearly grey stone-look vinyl that curved up the walls for the bottom couple of inches, in the same way that many hospitals have their floors done and for much the same reason – fewer crevices and easier to sweep/wash clean. (I think skirting boards in a bathroom are there solely to act as display areas for towel fluff.)  Tabbs was happy to demonstrate how neat and tidy this looks against the shower area’s newly installed glass wall.

And here we see Tabbs, demonstrating the new ‘cosy floor corners’ installation.

So, at the end of day six, we had our new floor in and everything else was left to dry until Monday. We kept going in there just to look at all the lovely clean space where only concrete chasms had existed earlier in the week.

In the third instalment of this gripping saga, all will be revealed about how we were once more able to wash in comfort (and what had been happening in the interim), how we got rid of the alien suckers hanging down from the ceiling, and the incredible anguish associated with a cupboard shelf. Stay tuned. :)

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* I suspect that if you’re like me and one of those people around whom clutter gradually accretes, then you too may find yourself puzzling over the fact that in such a cabinet you have such items as three half-used packets of sticky plasters, a nine-year old unopened bottle of distilled witch hazel, a box of small safety pins guaranteed to be needed in the 12 hours after you’d thrown them out, a free sample bottle of expensive make-up remover that I was never going to use but hadn’t thrown out because it was costly to buy…you know the sort of thing. Well, it would be an interesting collection to sort out.