Shower room latest

A couple of shots of the latest from the shower room.

After I fixed the disaster which was the vertically inadequate tiles, I got on with installing the shower taps, hand set and other accessories. Looks fantastic, water pressure still too low even with a pump, shower tray leaks in the corner. Still some work to be done then....

At least I won some battles with the wash stand. Sink waste leaked persistently, took some time to work out that there were two leaks, not just one. Now there are none. Door frame, skirting and low energy illuminated mirror all fixed and doing what they are supposed to.

Radiator is up too, although not yet connected. You may place your bets on whether there will be any leaks. What are the odds?

Bath panel

It was easiest to make the panel lying down flat on the floor, but with hindsight, that wasn't too clever....

It weighs a ton, with the stone tiles, and when raising it to the vertical position, it flexed enough for half of the long tile strips along the bottom to pop off, and some broke. Bum. Fixed now though.

Several heating pipes run under the bath, so when the radiators are connected and live and we have checked for leaks, we will grout the whole bath panel in making it look rather splosh.

7 week break!

I've been busy, that's the only excuse I'll offer. Most of the time I was otherwise engaged, but some progress has been made, not least of which was that both toilets were replaced due to their contents having a habit of leaking on the floor. Not ideal.

Well, I'm not about to go blasting you with half a million pictures of what's been happening, I'm going to feed it to you in tantalizingly small dribs and drabs. Starting off with a little series on the hole in the wall from the bedroom to the en-suite.

Going way back, you haven't seen the start of the en-suite yet. The opening through to the bedroom began with a few bricks knocked out and concrete lintels installed to support the wall. Sensibly, Richard had made some important notes and diagrams on exactly the bit of wall he was going to knock down.

This was the opening into the bedroom before Jack came and plastered the walls and ceiling.

The floor in the bedroom is a lot higher than the floor in the dressing room, which meant cutting a hole in the ceiling downstairs to make way for some steps.

Tricky Al made the steps. I left his money in an envelope behind the bar at the pub, so I hope he didn't drink it all. It was a squeeze making them fit, but fit they did.

Pat & Bri's

Going back a couple of weeks, we were in Kent doing some preparatory work on relocating my dear old mum, and we took some time out to visit my old pal Steve who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and who's blog I follow religiously. He was over visiting his folks Pat & Bri who have a beautiful old house near Canterbury, which as far as I could see needs just about no work doing to it. The lucky lucky....... This was the gathering of Steve's lovely family and lovely friends that evening.

Making Repairs

Well here I am, back at almost exactly the same stage (bathroomically speaking) that I was at this time last week, specifically being ready or thereabouts to start installing the shower door. Here's how I achieved this epic feat:

I cut out the damaged sections of plasterboard which had come away with the tiles, and bashed in some noggins which aren't in this picture, but trust me, I did. (Noggins are bits of wood that go horizontally between the vertical struts where you join bits of plasterboard so the joins can't move.)

Then I cut some bits of plasterboard to fill the holes, and fixed the damaged insulated boards at the back with some drywall adhesive.

Once that was all dry and hard I cut the tiles to the correct height (I quadruple-checked this time) and stuck them on.

And finally the tiles are grouted. When that is dry I can seal them and start work installing the door. In between doing all this I managed to relocate my dear mother 200 miles from Kent to Devon. I think I'll just pop off to Milliways for lunch now.

Triumph and Disaster

Having toiled away for most of the week tiling and grouting the shower and shower room floor, I had reached the point yesterday morning where the shower enclosure was all ready for the door to be fitted. Rather than steaming ahead with that which was the temptation, I decided to paint the walls first so that I didn't get paint all over the door and stuff.

So this morning I set about fitting the door. The first thing I discovered was that due to a mis-measurement of about 15mm, I had cut all the top row of tiles about 15mm too low.

So I had to smash off the top row of tiles....

Which of course took half the plasterboard off with them. I really can't think of anything funny to say about this.

Bang up to date

This very morn was I tiling the shower.

Look at my passage

The last couple of days I've spent clearing all the tools and dust and rubbish out of the airing cupboard and repositioning some electrics. Janine can start putting towels and fluffy things in it now!

The old...

The new. The plastering was done a couple of days ago by Jack, now it just needs a lick of paint, some floor tiles and a few bits of skirting and architrave. Job done.

Hole in the wall

The last thing Rich did before he left on his away mission was make a large rectangular hole in our bedroom wall. The day before, Janine had asked me where the hole was going to be, so I drew it on the wall in pen. In completely the wrong place. And the next day (when I wasn't around) Richard came and for some strange reason thought I'd marked it accurately, and made a hole in the wrong place. You've got to laugh...

This was after he'd filled the wrong hole and made the right one.

Through the hole, this is what you can see. A view through the dressing/wardrobe room into the en-suite shower room. As Rich was away we had Jack in for several days doing the plastering. He's very good. He helped lay the floor in the studio after I hurt my back.

Compact and bijou...

I know, I know already! I haven't updated the blog for weeks. Well, I've got lots of excuses, not least of which is that I sent Richard on a mission 200 miles away which has taken precedent over things here. Won't bore you with the details.

However, I have some pictures in reserve of what Richard was doing before he left. Here he's just starting on the third wall of the shower enclosure in the en-suite.

And here he's finished and plastered it. The bit that's not plastered will be tiled.

Then he put in the shower tray. A real neat little low-profile job.

Sewers

The Master Plaster Blaster has been troweling two-handed like a demented one of those blokes on an aircraft carrier waving two bats around to show the planes how to land. When Richard and I were speaking on the phone about how pink and wet the walls were, Paula, his lovely partner, thought we were being rude. Cuh, womens' minds are like sewers.

En-Suite

For the moment, we are concentrating our efforts on completing the en-suite shower room. When this is done, we can use it while we partly dismantle the bathroom in order to finish that off.

Yesterday, Richard installed a shower pump in the airing cupboard, and we pressure tested all the plumbing joints on the shower system. Then we charged up the pump and ran water through it. Don't want to tempt fate, but it all seemed to work.

So today Rich set about boarding up the wall inside which all the pipes and wiring run. The shower has a deluge head, shown here without its head.

A wider view.

The loo will be snug behind the yet to be built stud wall which will form the third side of the shower enclosure.

Christmas happened....

....and by some miracle we got an upstairs bathroom in a usable condition. There may not have been any heating, or a bath panel, but the bath was in, the taps worked, and most of the leaks were fixed.

On Boxing Day I was first up, and the first job of the day was to empty the tray placed below the sink unit to catch the water leaking from the hot tap connection. Thought I'd go to the loo while I was there, flushed it, nothing.... No whooshy noise like you're supposed to hear. Uh oh, rising panic, get a grip.... Taps don't work, this is bad. Very bad. Its really, really cold in here... Frozen pipes! Aaargh! Off with the skirting board, on with the fan heater and hair dryer. Got it thawed out and working, no new leaks, before any of our seven guests even got out of bed. The whole world in fact was ignorant of my twenty minutes of sheer, blind terror. That's the way it goes.

In between the seven Christmas guests leaving and the five New Year guests arriving, I had one day to get the oak wash stand out, sand it down, get two coats of Danish oil on it and put it back in. It hadn't stood up to the hard use over Christmas with constant exposure to water from plumbing leaks and guests, mainly due to the fact that some silly twit had painted it with floor sealer instead of Danish oil because they didn't read the labels on the very similar looking tins. What a moron.

Legend

We've been trial fitting some of the furniture and sanitaryware. Richard, who must by now have a near god-like status in the minds of anyone following this blog, will surely be elevated to legendary when you realize he's made the two oak washstands with his own gnarly hands.

Here's the small one for the shower room.....

.....and the big one for the bathroom.

And the throne for when the queen pops round.

Plumbing

Here's a couple of pictures of the plumbing that's going to be hidden inside the dividing wall between the two bathrooms.

The shower where you may notice part of the studwork was ever so slightly on fire when the joint was soldered....

....and the bath.

Blooming heck, a bath deck!

This was yesterday.

Richard was busy with bits and pieces of plumbing and stuff, and I started work on making the bath deck. Some very expensive tiling board is screwed down to the wooden frame.

By this afternoon (having purchased a tile cutter due to the fact that Richard's friend borrowed his, locked it away and went off on holiday, allegedly) there were tiles all around the top of the deck, some on the walls and the holes for the taps were drilled. We've gone for a kind of Roman baths look. (We got a deal on the stone tiles) We'll have to invite some friends over one evening for an orgy.

The first trial fit of the taps reveal just how lush they will look.

Animal grace

Watching Richard plastering is like watching Swan Lake with pink slop.

The shape of things to come

I took this snap in the tile shop this morning, which is very similar to how our bath installation will look. Hopefully by the end of the week.

More progress

The family bathroom is now all plaster boarded awaiting the attention of Richard's trowel. He came into work yesterday (Saturday) for a few hours, complete with hangover (not his fault, all his naughty friends to blame) which you have to say shows dedication and commitment not usually found in oafish builders.

He had Sunday off though, a day of rest and worship at the alter of San Miguel for Richard. Not me though, I built the framework for the bath deck.

Only made three cock-ups that I counted too... Not bad!

Sun pipe

Holding it delicately at arms length with his hat pulled tightly down over his eyes to protect him from the blinding light transmitted through the sun pipe from the roof, Richard thinks, "Now what do I do, I can't see a blooming thing...."