Bathroom construction, part one

I have talked about destroying the bathroom to renovate it. It turns out the construction phase is longer as I’m relying on tradies to come and do things in various orders. There is a lot of wait times and a lot of dealing with so many horrible men who patronised me or didn’t bother getting back to me. My main criteria for engaging a tradie (plumber, plasterer, electrician, tiler) has been: are they a patronising, rude, goitburger?

OMG so many judgemental, awful, dicks out there. I mean, why. Why would you tell someone ‘you have to replace your shower/basin’ and then when the client says “I have no intention of doing that’ – why sneer at them? If they did this to me – and some of them did – GET OUT OF MY HOUSE.

So…WE HAVE NOT HAD A SHOWER HERE IN OVER THREE WEEKS. Lots of trips to the gym to shower there! And baths. So many really shallow baths. And sponge baths using the sink. OMG.

The first thing I had to do was get the plasterers in. There was a lot of being dicked around by quotes that never arrived, in the end I want with a dude called Jayson who had a really good hipster ned-kelley beard, who did an excellent job. They hated doing the room – 70 year old river red gum framing had warped and it was all over the shop. Also the wood is super hard and hard to work with.

I chose the same cornice my grandmother had (she lived in a similar aged house in Bentleigh East) to which my dad laughed and pointed out how horrible it was to paint. He was…correct. It looks good but it sucked.

I painted the room after that: the same white as in the rest of the house trimmings onto the roof, and the same green as the basin on the walls. A slightly lighter green covering the two cabinets.

After a bit of research, I worked out how to waterproof the wall behind the shower area, and I did that. Waterproofing is lots of layers of various things and the top 3 coats are bright blue. When I rang to engage the tiler and said I’d been waterproofing, he asked “Does it look like you’ve murdered a smurf?”. Yes. Yes it did. And that was the tiler for me. He had me at ‘murdered a smurf’.

I had to change my tile plans during his quote and worked out I had not enough. So ended up having to order more of the same tiles. So a bit of delay. The tiles were completed yesterday. He said he usually disliked green in bathrooms but he didn’t mind my colour choices at all. A lot of modern green tiles are very…slubby? dirty green? Yucky green, anyway. I’ve gone for intense 1950s wall green and mint green tiles (literally the only non horrible green I could find anywhere).

I built a little shelf at the end of the bath where the old horrible boxed in section had been, which gives more room in the shower area. I am super, SUPER, impressed with the tiling job. It is beautiful.

I have just had the showerscreen dude come and measure up my shower for a glass screen we won’t get it for nearly two weeks. Going to organise some sort of curtain so we can shower. Until now I’ve had baths. which is weird and not as fun. Or had showers at other people’s houses…or the gym. Not ideal.

For the floor that is a bit of a saga. I dislike tiles on floors – they are cold, and I drop and therefore break things. So it had to be vinyl, but based on my last experience the click-together stuff is not good for bathrooms. So a big piece of vinyl it had to be….and I had to find something that didn’t suck.

I ordered vinyl flooring from CQ flooring. I chose ‘blue opal’ and sent the dimensions I wanted. I didn’t want not fake wood, checkerboard, or a single block colour so I went with a mixed aggregate that had the colour of the basin in it. This was the least suck-full flooring I could find anywhere in Australia. What is wrong with people that everyone wants boring floors! It was delivered….The flooring that arrived was 7cm too short…ARGH! But after a discussion (there is a big difference between 2.1m and 2.03m when there is no way to hide a join in a small bathroom), they actually sent me another roll straight away…too long, but that was MUCH better. But in order to lay it I had to remove the hand basin (again) and the toilet; that is literally a shitty job. So over the underlay that has been there for weeks, yesterday I laid the proper floor.

There is a lot still to go to finish the room. I have skirting boards, medicine cabinet, shelves. I have to get the lights put in but first I have to cut out the manhole cover from the plaster for access! And somehow make and edge for that. I’ve done some other stuff too with the mirror and pictures that I will also blog about soon.

Part two, the conclusion!