The BIG bathroom conversion (Part 1)

One of the things that wasn't ideal about the house was the bathroom / shower room.  We think that when the house was built the bathroom and toilet would have been two seperate rooms.  What past owners had done was squeeze a sink and a loo and an airing cupboard / hot water tank in the bathroom and closed off the entrance to the toilet from the landing added a shower and made it into an en-suite shower room with access from the back bedroom.  It was all a little dated and I was not fond of the idea of Lewis having an en-suite in his room.  The bathroom habits of little boys are questionable at the best of times and that coupled with the thought of taps left running ... and floods,  set alarm bells off in my mind.

The reality was that the bathroom would be a big expense to renovate and I'd just have to put up with it until we'd saved enough money to sort it out. Besides, there were other priorities.  The boiler that controlled the heating as was on its last legs.  Each time we turned on the heating and heard it groan & shudder into action we wondered if it were its last dying breaths.  Not to mention when we moved in we had to buy a fridge, a freezer, a washing machine, a dishwasher and a tumble dryer because those things were already installed in our rented house so we'd never had to buy them.

Anyway.

ENTER my 'friend', Water Pressure.

We'd shipped the kids up to Nanny & Gaggans for the move (thanks Mum!) so they'd be out of the way and we could live like students (late nights, take-aways, not much studying, that kind of thing) whilst we did some immediate work, like getting our bedroom re-plastered and painted and general unpacking (I thought so long as I have a nice place to sleep at the end of the day, a little sanctuary, if you like, then I can deal with the rest). So our first days in the house went as follows, getting up and dressed, doing decorating and unpacking and then showers in the evening to clean up.

Everything was fine .... no??

Fast forward to my return to work, alarm went off at 7am, got in the shower ....... the water was FREEZING!!  After a couple of basic checks ... have I switched the power on to the (electric) shower??, check, have the power swtiches tripped in the night???, nope, I realised I didn't have time for all this drama so settled for a quick bath before going to work.  Martins called me later on in the morning to tell me the shower was working jsut fine, plenty warm enough and I must have been doing it wrong.  Seriously??!!

When I got home I checked the shower and it was fine.  <Shrug> and I jumped in a showered.

The next morning FREEZING!! And so it continued.  I reorganised my hygiene routine to have my hot shower just before I went to bed and got up and dressed in the morning.  This was not ideal but doable in the winter but as my thoughts drifted to the summer, hot nights and my inability to stand under a cold shower I wondered how we'd get through to summer and if anyone would be able to stand downwind of us pongy people come April.

We decided to start early on the bathroom with the money we'd saved so far and a credit card for the rest.

The next big spanner in the works was my kidney surgery and my refusal to convalesce in a building site, it did however, give me 4 weeks to peruse bathroom brochures and scour magazines for ideas.

This is the thing.  I thought bathroom shopping would be fun.  It was HORRIBLE!!

To explain my dilemma, I'll take you back to my childhood.  Cue the end of the summer holiday and I was staying in Cardiff with my Aunt & Uncle and cousins.  We made the usual pilgrimage into Cardiff central on the train.  Aunty Kathy was with us because I think we might have been a little too young to go by ourselves or some items of school uniform were required.  On my shopping list was a pencil case and some supplies for school.  I remember seeing one I liked in WH Smith and then touring around other stationery stores in Cardiff to see what else was on offer before finally deciding that the one in WH Smith was "the One" and going back to buy it.  Now this seemed perfectly fine and quite sensible to me ... you know checking out your options before committing.  When I heard Aunty Kathy on the phone to my mum that evening she said "and so we traipsed around every single shop that could possible sell a pencil case before going back to buy the one she saw in the first shop".

Now if I was like that as a child buying a pencil case you can imagine what I was like as an adult buying an ENTIRE bathroom.  We'd scoured, B&Q and Wickes and The Bathstore and there was nothing that I was 100% sure about.  The guy that was doing our bathroom suggest a plumbing merchant, so off we went to City Plumbing and came out with about 50 brochures from the various manufacturers.  There was too much choice and it was so overwhelming, I liked elements of different styles.  There were things I had to buy that I didn't know existed, like shower valves and diverters. Things I had to consider, like which taps were suitable for which water pressure.

I kept putting off the job, because the thought of choosing all the stuff we needed left me panicky.  Mum told me I'd given myself too much choice and I should just limit myself to one brochure or store but I couldn't do that knowing that I might find the perfect tap in the next brochure (as it happened I did find the perfect taps, an the whole bathroom designed centered around those!).

Over the course of the next 12 weeks, and many planning meetings with Grant (the plumber) and Martins (who just walked out because he didn't want to debate which shower heads went with what taps and where the lights would go any further) we agreed the budget, the layout, all the items that needed ordering, the logistics and the timing.

The plan was that the bathroom would take about 2-3 weeks to complete and on Saturday 10th March, Grant turned up with a sledgehammer and a shed load of materials and said "Are you ready for this??, its going to be messy"