Getting a new bathroom ...

Having polished off the last of the shutters, it's now time to get serious with the bathroom. All the fittings were showing their age (early 1970s I'd guess), some were cracked, and the bath was beyond repair. So I turned off the water and took a sledgehammer to the bath, a cast-iron thing that really must have weighed a third of a ton, and shipped the resulting pieces to the tip.

The bathroom then looked like this:



The holes in the floor were my efforts at finding where the drainpipes went: successful too, as I did find them. The hole in the back wall was the previous plumber's access to the tap connections for the bath, though how anyone could have worked on it through that hole is beyond me. Not very nice for anyone using the bedroom on the other side of the wall, either. So I bricked it up and put up the framework for the plasterboard:



Surprisingly, the metal structure is all nicely vertical or horizontal - it's the camera that's lying this time. The one bit that looks absolutely askew is a bit of gaffer tape holding a pipe away from the structure.

The new plumbing is plastic "PER" pipe, which I'd not used before, but it has seemed quite easy to get good watertight connections. I've run the new piping back as far as I can towards the mains, down into the cellar, as the copper pipes are not just very small diameter but are also in poor condition - odd leaks in various inaccessible places.

Putting up the plasterboard was something of a struggle by myself, but it went up with only one regrettable gap on the lefthand side: all nice and tight to the walls and ceiling elsewhere. There's a handcrafted hole built into it for the soap and shampoo in the shower area, though I am now wishing I had measured the height of a standard bottle of shampoo. It'll be OK for the soap, at least.



The fitting for the shower taps etc is likely to pose another problem. I now know that I shouldn't have taped the pipes to the metal framework, as it restricts the amount you can move the pipes: after the fittings go on, they are supposed to be pushed back into the wall. They are presently not easily pushable. I may have to play around with a long thin (curved?) knife and cut the gaffer tape by fiddling about through the little holes.

Next thing is to put down the new floor, ready for tiling. Though before the tiles I have to build the wall between the washbasin and the shower, then build a support for the washbasin, tehn box in the suspended WC and ..... well, quite a bit more I suppose. And it would probably be best to get the ceiling smoothed off before starting work on the floor - and do the electrical work so I can have lights in there. Hmmm - a week or two to go yet I think.