Getting close
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
After three weeks of builders and dust, and a bathroom in various stages of deconstruction and reconstruction (photos here), I finally feel like we’ve almost arrived!
Yes, there are quite a few things left to do – the principal one being the marble surface around the basin, and then the basin itself – but all the other important bits are there. And it’s looking a lot prettier now that the tiles are (almost) complete.
We’ve had a couple of boring setbacks. One was me ordering the wrong type of cistern (we wanted a push-button type). 
Which meant that to stay on schedule, we had to offer to have a toilet sans cistern for a fortnight — an inconvenience to be sure, but at least the bath taps were nearby. Another delay was needing to order extra tiles.
And lastly we’ve challenged the builders on the bath panel, which didn’t turn out very well.
The UK default with baths is to buy the bath with a plastic fitted panel to go with it. However I’ve never been particularly fond of that style – my preference was for the South African look which involves a panel that can be tiled…
I suspect that our builders haven’t done too many of these and they got it a bit wrong. They added some extra timber to make the bath sturdier, which then meant that the bath panel couldn’t go as far under the bath as it ought to, which then made the tiles on the panel stick out and look rather odd. There’s been some to-ing and fro-ing on that one, but they’ve now agreed to re-do it next week.
Anyway, the big event for us this weekend is Tom’s parents arriving tomorrow! So we’re very grateful that the new cistern went in yesterday, and little enough remains that the builders could take away their protective floor-coverings. Which just leaves us with the universal dusting operation, and next week’s finishing touches to look forward to. 
