Julie's Boggle

For those of you who feel that the bathroom renovation story (started here and was updated here) is dragging on a little – and it did! – the good news is that it’s all done now.  (Actually it was all done about 2 weeks ago, but this is the first chance I’ve had to write it up.)

The bath panel which I was lamenting in the previous post, was redone over the course of a day.  And to everyone’s profound relief, this time around the artisans concerned were able to correct the earlier inadequacies most admirably.

That left only a few outstanding items, the main one of which was the fitting of the counter-top for the basin unit. (This ended up a bit less cream-coloured than I’d anticipated based on the online catalogue, but overall I think it works.)

So, *contented sigh*, we can finally settle down and enjoy our revamped bathroom space, having successfully ticked off all the annoyances with the previous bathroom.  Yee-ha.

These little pics don’t really do it justice, but you can find the full set of photos (from start to finish) here, if you’re really interested.

We think it’s great.

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.

Since recovering from the financial pain of paying the deposit and stamp duty for our present flat, we’ve been steadily ploughing through a list of rooms that need to be overhauled, in order of importance.

First came the shower room (2005) which was so ghastly beforehand that I didn’t even think to take any pictures until they’d ripped the whole thing out.  Then later that year came the conservatory — the fact that it was falling down around us forced our hand on that one.

The next logical step, in 2007, was the kitchen, being such a key area, and we definitely pushed the boat out for that project, turning it into an amazing space (combined with the little conservatory) that we love to spend time in.  That left only the bathroom which I’d more or less resigned myself to living with until we moved on.

Here’s how that changed.

The first in the series of (unfortunate?) events was that Tom lost his job, leaving us with a chunk of cash, but one that we might have to live off in the event of Tom remaining unemployed.

The second was the whole long and frustrating episode (happy ending fortunately) with the upstairs neighbour’s dodgy pipework which was dripping through our ceiling.  Since that was fixed we’ve been living with some significant holes in our bathroom.

L to R: Hole(s) around the bathroom light-fitting, and missing wall panel

We agreed that in theory, Tom could fix these himself if the jobless situation persisted.  But they’d be left as they were until he had finished his mandatory leave, so that if he had a job to go to by the end of it, we’d have the funds available to get someone in.  (And why stop at fixing a few holes when there are so many other things we want to change?)

Happily, Tom went on to find another job, and we pressed ahead with getting our favourite builder over to see what could be done with our space.

This being London, flats are not the largest, and our bathroom in particular is on the compact side.  It didn’t take long for our builder to veto our original plan of putting in a corner bath across the end and moving the toilet.

(According to the plumber, the major stumbling block is fitting the bath and a 3″ sewer pipe into the available width, which is a little over 1.3m. Hmph. :zipit: )

After some head scratching, we came up with Plan B which still ticks all the boxes in terms of fixing (F) things we dislike (D) about the bathroom, while not requiring us to move any actual walls around :

D: Overly narrow bath that moves slightly when you get into it.
F: Slightly wider, double-ended bath, fitted properly.

D: Uncooperative bath taps and leaky shower head.
F: New bath mixer taps and shower.

D: Grotty linoleum floor covering.
F: Tiles on the floor.

D: Peeling wallpaper on solid walls on the right.
F: Tiles all round, floor-to-ceiling.

D: Heated towel rail (on left) not connected to the central heating.
F: New radiator plumbed into the central heating and with an extra “summer heating element” wired in.

D: Non-functional mirror light.
F: Replacement light.

D: No plug point for our electric toothbrush.
F: New shaver socket.

D: Typically English hard-to-access toilet cistern (we had to lever out a grouted-in panel to get to it the first time we needed to! ).
F: Push back the wall and have a regular cistern.

D: Aforementioned holes in ceiling and wall.
F: New ceiling and wall panel.

D: Cupboards that stick and are hard to open.
F: New cupboards.

To fit in a wider bath, we’ve asked the builders to pull the bath forward a bit and flatten off the back wall.  This leaves a cavity on the right-hand-side, and that’s going to become a cupboard.

The fun starts this Friday – whee! – when the builders are coming in to strip out everything except the toilet.  From there, they are going to do their utmost to finish it in a month!  Promises to be absolute mayhem, especially with Jon around, so I’m hanging onto the “long-term gain” idea (yes, I really DO want a new bathroom!) and trying not to think about it.

Life is never dull, especially if you live in a converted Victorian house whose structure and fittings are anything from 0 to 120 years old. Our most recent adventure has been tracking down (over a period of months!) a leak coming through our bathroom ceiling light fitting.

We started by suspecting our own plumbing, and vetoing that by switching our water off and observing that the leak continued.

The suspicion next fell on our upstairs neighbour’s worn out sealant in the shower/bath. So our neighbour fixed the sealant. The leak continued.

(We learned later when we removed some wall panelling and found dried up water damage that this was indeed causing a different, smaller leak which we had indeed fixed).

We found a bad seal on the waste pipe from the upstairs sink, but that wasn’t it. We also fixed the upstairs toilet cistern which was very slowly pouring water through the overflow pipe. Still the leak continued.

So we became cunning. We mounted a webcam and a mini-Maglight on a stick, attached the webcam to the laptop and made ourselves a crude endoscope, which just fit through the light fitting in the bathroom ceiling, and also through the hole in the old Victorian ceiling above our 1980s plasterboard ceiling. Paydirt!

Our little camera showed us a badly corroded pipe which had been sealed off in the most rough and ready fashion.

But how to access the pipe? It was under a tiled floor and above two ceilings! Well, part of the problem solved itself because the Victorian ceiling collapsed onto the plasterboard ceiling which in turn became very soggy and was in clear need of repair itself. So in the end it was a no-brainer, we had to go through the ceiling.

And so today the plumber came and that is what he did, and this is the piece of pipe he removed:

I’ll leave it to you to think up adjectives describing the mindset that puts such a piece of workmanship between a tiled floor and a double ceiling.

After the previous post, there were some people who came back and said “So what’s wrong with the old shed? It looks fine.” The above photos illustrate the point, rather well I think, that, close up, the old shed was Tired.

We also had a small rodent that had taken up residence, subsisting on the seeds I kept in there for the garden birds. In short, the shed was not (and had not been for a long time) a great place to store anything we cared about.

So moving swiftly on, the old shed was flattened in under 10 minutes by our hired handyman and his happy helper. He then proceeded to pour the concrete base for the new shed and assemble the rather complicated replacement shed we’d bought.

Unfortunately in practice, the “Grosfillex Utility 3 Plastic Shed” turned out to be a lot less stable than it looked on the website we ordered it from. The presentation was great, but the product definitely doesn’t warrant the extortionate price they charge for it. For the rigidity it offers, I would have thought it should be half the price.

On the plus side, it does look very pretty. So lets hope it doesn’t have to withstand any gale force winds in its current location!

…

That was the end of part II which we actually reached just before our holiday to SA.

Part III was transferring various effects into the new shed (all done while Jon and I were in SA, thank you Tom ), and getting rid of the old one’s remains!

We were originally quoted £150 for this operation, so it was a very happy coincidence that I thought to ask our local council if they would do it for us. They would only pick it up from the pavement (so Tom and I had the task of lugging the sections through the house to the front), but they only wanted £31 (woo-hoo!) to do the rest, which seemed a much fairer deal all round.

Sings merrily, “Ding-dong, the shed is gone…”

As you’ll know, if you’ve been following this blog, the kitchen was completed several weeks ago. Way back when it started, I posted some pictures of the old kitchen and an “artistic impression” of the new kitchen. Now we can finally compare old, artistic impression and final result:

Old:

Artistic impression:

Final result:

I think you’ll agree it was worth the long weeks of living in a building site.

You can see the entire progress from start to finish in Julie’s kitchen album.

All the free time of the last two weekends has been pretty much fully consumed with moving into our new kitchen. [Final handover was Monday after they got through the last items on the snag-list.]

It’s been a multi-faceted operation, firstly cleaning every nook and cranny to get rid of the builders’ dust, then transferring all the previous kitchen cupboard contents into their new homes, and lastly, going through the remaining “kitchen” boxes that had come from South Africa. Hoorah! Out came our wedding crockery and the Kenwood mixers.

This is just the sort of undertaking which could very well have taken Tom and me the better part of two months to work through, except that we had a deadline: my sister and her fiancé are coming to stay this week — from Tuesday to Saturday to be precise, so we couldn’t procrastinate anywhere near as much as we wanted to.

As a result, this weekend in particular has been extremely hectic. (This is the first time I’ve sat down at my PC since Thursday.) Hard to say if it’s the pregnancy that’s making it worse, but I’m definitely feeling rather footsore and weary now, for the second day in a row. Ready for a nice hot bath.

But on the plus side, we’ve once again got a functioning guest room, currently about 95% ready, tomorrow night will see the finishing touches  and I’ve got 4 days off this week to spend with Kristy and Wayne before they fly home to SA on Saturday.

Apologies to anyone who feels that we’re lingering a little too much on the kitchen topic of late, but it’s hard to focus on anything else with this all-important area of our home having been turned into a building site!

We did finally clear another significant milestone on Thursday though when the new worktops for the kitchen arrived.

Their delivery was actually the second part of a two-phase process, the first of which was the “templating”. (Which is a bit like cutting out a pattern if you’ve ever done clothes-making at home.) For this, the friendly guys from Polished Stone came over with a supply of hard-board and magic-markers, and cut out exact replicas of every surface we would need.

It was all done with great efficiency. They then handed me some granite samples for us to choose from and went off to await our decision.

After some thought, we picked the aptly named “Star Galaxy” option. Black with gold flecks. The variety of flecks we wanted in the granite had been a point of indecision beforehand (we both agreed plain black was too dull), but Star Galaxy won me over when I saw how well the gold bits picked up the warm tones from the wood and the tiles.

And then, a week later, came the big day when Jonathan and Tony returned with our hefty granite slabs…

Just like assembling a giant jigsaw, they slotted them all expertly into place.

(There had been a concern with the sink piece initially – they’d got back to us to say that it didn’t look like it could all be got out of one slab of stone. )

Option 1, a join, would not have looked as good but they had given us the other alternatives of a full refund on our deposit – i.e. start again with someone else, or paying out another £1000 to cut the whole lot from a bigger block of granite . We took the join. And were subsequently delighted to find that they had actually worked out a plan and managed to get that delicate piece all out of one. )

Once all the pieces were in, there were lots of minute adjustments of cupboard levels, then applications of joint material, silicon, and a protective layer of polish before they could finally step back and say it was all complete. Hurrah!

For anyone who wants to see more of the above photos and other details, they’re on the second page of our Kitchen makeover album.

I’ve been a bit slow with updating things lately – blame it on some chaotic weekends out, and a lovely weekend away – but I have managed to finish sorting the photos of the kitchen upgrade.

So for those of you who have an interest in our kitchen transformation, there’s a link to the album, on the right under Albums, or you can just click here.

Obviously we’ve still got a little way to go (about 2 weeks apparently), but any new pics will be added onto the end of the album as they arrive, so watch this link…