I moved into this house in 2001 and have had a love/hate relationship with the bathroom since then.
The size is good. It has a skylight and a nice green basin and green bath and an unusual mirror on the wall. That’s it for the good points.
When I moved in there was no shelving other than a medicine cabinet. No where to store stuff. In the shower/bath combo there were no tiles, just contact paper on the walls. Everything was dark grey, it was pretty grim.
I had to tile it – I did a pretty terrible job and I didn’t waterproof it enough, but neither did the people before me. The set-up of the shower is ‘a shower over a bath with a 1980s screen’ and they boxed in the area to make it all fit. I’m pretty sure there was some fuckery involved with why the taps and shower head were where they were because of moving an outdoor toilet inside at some point in the 80s.
I painted it all yellow. The blue tiles I did the shower in matched the then-blue toilet that a few years later went on the TRASH. It was a pretty terrible toilet, didn’t work so well.
The walls were Masonite, nailed down by strips of wood, and have been visibly warping over time. Every mark and scratch showed up on them.
When I first took the flooring up to lay new stuff I found a treasure trove of 1951 newspapers under the lowest level. I cut them out and pasted them to the walls. It made for an incredibly interesting read and people have gone into the bathroom and gotten lost in there – but I’ve hated it for about half the time I’ve been here.
The flooring I’ve had for a while is click in vinyl panels that had warped where water got in.
All in all…it had to all go IN THE TRASH!
All of my additions have been compromises that have cost very little to do and I’ve just put up with it all.
Well, recently the shower screen has been falling apart and in dire need of repair or replacement. But all around the shower screen really needed some genuine fixing too. I could not just fit a new one in. The more I looked, the more i was filled with the realisation of how much I hated this room and how yuck it was.
I didn’t want to destroy the articles, so step one was to dampen and remove them with a spay bottle and a palette knife…spray, lift, spray, lift. Some were destroyed by accident but most I removed and have kept in a folder. This took a long time to do.
I then took out walls, skirting, fixings, and floor. This was the destructive phase that took forever. So much wrenching and nail pulling and smacking myself in the head (by accident) with stuff.
Taking out the tiles and then putting up plastic curtains so we could shower was next. It was like showering in a plastic bag. And I found a lot of mold behind those tiles! I took out the ‘boxed in’ section.
Also took out the floor and all the nails. I got used to being covered in shit from inside walls that had 70 years of crud in them. My hands were full of splinters. Also had to get all the electrics removed.
Thus, was the destruction phase completed. Ready for the next bit…construction!