Wow! A shower!

The water doesn't show up too well in the picture, but there is definitely water coming out of the shower. Warm water. I can't believe we've been here nearly six years and this is the first shower we've had in our house in all that time. We hope to have another one by Christmas.

25 Litres in a day...

...of white emulsion went up on the walls and ceilings. The pictures say it all.

Painting

The reason for the big clear out on Monday? So we could all paint like crazy on Tuesday!

Niels did the ceilings because he is the tallest, and also the only one apart from Sal who doesn't have some physical ceiling painting impairment.

The lovely Sal (Niels's partner) wearing my old Dexy's Midnight Runners style dungarees.

The lovely J9 hard at it.

AJ was at it too!

Niels and AJ found a highly efficient way of spinning the washed up paint rollers dry!

Paint boy

He ain't heavy...

...he's a poo-head, is what I might have said about my younger brother Niels in my younger days for a laugh, but when your brother comes hundreds of miles to see you with his lovely partner and you rope him into helping you clean out three tons of dust and crap from a building site, that's hardly polite, not to mention ungrateful.

Here he is. He's in a brilliant band called Birdafraider based up north near Hull.
http://www.birdafraider.co.uk/

And this is the result of some hours of dust/crap removal.

When I wasn't sketching....

I was fixing all the shower attachments,

trying out the cold water supply,

and fixing up the illuminated mirror. I also finished the tiling (apart from the blue ones which haven't come yet) for good measure.

Cork Screw

My pal Steve in New York has a brilliant blog called Sketch of the Day (there's a link to it here). He did a drawing of his favourite bottle opener yesterday which inspired me to do a sketch of my favourite cork screw. Objects that enable humans to access alcohol are highly desirable in my book.

Showers forecast

We should be having showers within the next week or so, according to Michael Fish. Some will be heavy and prolonged.

Got the unit on the wall

This is where the water comes in

Neat and tidy with the front on.

Unfortunately we need to wait until our house has an earth upgrade and some extra gismos are installed by sparky (we have a new sparky, he's called Agg and he's not nearly as hideous as the old one) which should happen next week.

Sunshine and fluffy things

After having had not just one, but two of those days, today was much better. Almost everything I did went right.

I marked the wall and screwed some big bolts into it to support the sink. They are in the right place!

I secured the sink to the wall with the bolts, and connected the waste and the taps. I didn't cut any of the pipes too short like I usually do!

And when everything was fixed together it all looked like this. Super! And tomorrow I'll fix the skirting board and make all this permanent with the pedestal hiding the pipes and the bodged-up skirting board.

And finally, I beat the toilet into submission and it doesn't leak. It was a long, hard fight. I won. That'll teach these inanimate objects to mess with me!

Grrrrrrrr!

I'll spare you the profanities today, but I've spent all afternoon trying to get the loo not to leak, unsuccessfully. How annoying.

Cert 18

No sex or violence, just bad language. You have been warned....

Richard came round to help out with some advice today, and he reminded me that the joints for the waste pipe needed sticking with special glue to seal them, a pot of which he'd left behind for that very purpose. I spotted it only the other day, and thought, "What the hell is that for?" It's for sticking the f***ing waste pipes together you f***ing t***er, which are now f***ing sealed be-f***ing-hind the f***ing skirting boards, that's f***ing what f***ing for, you f***ing stupid git! So I had to f***ing saw a f***ing piece out of my f***ing beautiful pro-f***ing-fessional-looking skirting boards so I could get at the f***ing b***ard s**ding joints and f***ing stick them. B***ocks.


Here is the offending joint, now stuck. I will try to mend it all as invisibly as possible, but thanks to my own f***ing crap memory (oh yes, it all came flooding back when Richard mentioned it!) I will always know there's a horrible bodge job lurking behind the washbasin pedestal. I wonder what else the last four months of geared turbofanery have wiped from my brain...

Sink

Sorry you didn't get anything yesterday, loyal followers, but I did a load of fiddly bits like siliconing and I had to do admin and go to the doctors with a pesky trapped nerve that's been plaguing me. He gave me some pills which have turned me into a zombie, so I will have to go back. However, I did get to trial fit the sink today. I am aiming to get that final wall tiled tomorrow and everything fitted on Monday. Hello Richard, can you pop round tomorrow and show me how to fit the shower?

Cubicle

Luckily I was good at Lego and Airfix kits when I was a kid. Those old skills came in handy when I opened the box of the new shower cubicle...



...and found all these bits. The instructions were rubbish, and at the end I had lots of pieces left over. Just like with Airfix kits.

The first part was fixing the side pieces of glass to the wall with aluminium rails and screws. More like Meccano really, but i was good at that too.


Then I had to fix the doors on, with nice shiny hinges.


The doors have magnetic gaskets to seal the gap when they're closed. Very clever. Hard to get good photos when the room is so tiny!

Miles of tiles

I started the day by sticking some tiles to the wooden support base for the shower tray.....

.....and then carried on tiling and grouting. By the way, I didn't put the toilet back in on Tuesday as I had previously stated, because it would be right in the jolly old way.

Jamming

Not in the Bob Marley sense, but in the jamming bits of wood in to hold the skirting boards on while the glue sets sense. So the skirting boards are now a huge hassle to remove, so I hope I haven't done anything stupid which would make that necessary. Had to go out this morning to buy a load more tiles as I had forgotten to add an entire wall into my tile-coverage calculations, so moments of stupidity are not beyond me. Let's hope for the best.

The thin blue line

I refer of course to the line of blue tiles in this picture, adding a splash of colour to what is otherwise a relatively monochromatic world of grey and white, not the truly dreadful '90's sitcom with Rowan Atkinson as a rubbish polieceman in charge of even rubbisher policemen and ladies.

Loo corner

I think it will be about Tuesday before I can replace the toilet (when the wall behind it is tiled and grouted). Until then we'll all have to cross our legs or join the dog in the garden.

Here go the first of the tiles on this side of the room. My goodness! I'm almost starting to think that shower tray will get used in anger one day!

Tile and Skirting

Hello again blog fans! We have been busy today. Richard is still contributing to the project by kindly lending me his tools, even when he knows I break half of them. Everything still seems to be working now though....

The first tile went on the shower room wall!

And here's a trial fit of the skirting along the back wall. Plan for tomorrow is fitting all the skirting and proceeding apace with the tiling. Possible hang-over may slow things down a bit...

I'm Back!

Hello fans! This is the moment you've been waiting for..... I'm back! (in case you hadn't already gathered that from the title of this post) You better believe it baby, and boy have I got some stuff to show you over the next couple of weeks.

I've been working like crazy on a pesky job which filled four times the amount of time it should have, and now I have just over two weeks until my brother Niels and his lovely partner Sal are coming to stay, so I've got to sort out the Love Shack and the bathroom for them.



First, we must tile the floor. I'm actually posting this while waiting for the tile adhesive to dry so that I can go back in and do the tiles around the edges, which necessitates standing on the tiles I've laid already.

I think the shiny grey floor will look very nice.

Just for a bit of fun, I shall not publicize the fact that I'm posting again, and I'll just see who is the first person to post a comment. That person will get a prize, possibly a sweetie. Who will the lucky winner be?