Mostly finished bathroom

Ten weeks into the build and the bathroom is finished (except for a little snagging). And I started a new job yesterday. My summer off went super quick.

Here's the inbuilt shelving. Would be my preference to only have Aesop products but my family would disagree.

The cabinet is massive - managed to get all first aid and skincare items in my side...

View from the bathroom looking towards the hallway (lampshade is from B&Q - amazingly). The white box on the wall controls the underfloor heating.

Wall hung toilet and a Geberit flusher, which is the same style as the ones in my new office. Odd coincidence.

Slate non-slip flooring is from Topps Tiles.

Heated towel rail was from JT Spas - who delivered quickly and had excellent customer service (before and after).

Massive cabinet and lights were from Ikea...

...as was the double wall hung sink unit.

These photos were taken early evening - the light during the day is intense! Really happy with how it turned out. Kind of like a retro Case Study house.

Bathroom is almost finished

This is the view from the hallway looking into the bathroom. The sliding door is necessary in the space or it would be wacking into the double sink.

We ordered a shower door from a retailer on eBay but it took 5 weeks to get the bathroom ready to install it. When the builders opened the package they found that the shower door was smashed as were the brackets. The retailer wouldn't refund or replace as 30 days had passed since we ordered it. We found a better shower door subsequently and combined they were both cheaper than one from a reputable retailer so all's well that ends well.

The gunmetal grey tiles look on the brown side in these photos.

The giant wall panel to flush the loo allows access to the hidden cistern. I never knew that's what they were for!

The enormous towel rail accommodates all our towels and will keep the room toasty in winter - well, that and the underfloor heating (thank you Breaking Bad...)

The mirror is actually a huge cabinet which is sunk flush into the wall. The best bit is that the inside of the doors are mirrored so you can see the side of your head when it's open.

Before pics: The bathroom & ensuite

Kind friends have said that this bathroom isn't so bad. I guess at first glance it's no worse than many rental properties with it's 1980s bland aesthetic. But having lived with it for the last six years I know all it's shortcomings. And I'm now cured of a desire to ever have white tiles again.

A tiled in cistern. Genius idea. Not.

Ye olde stippled ceiling. And an unpredictable light that blew transformers due to a design fault.

I have no idea why real estate agents tell people that an extra bathroom will add £10k or whatever onto the asking price. We certainly didn't pay over the odds for this house because it had an ensuite. As it happened, the shower had about as much water pressure as a weak watering can so swiftly became a hanging rack for my clothes. The only true benefit was having a sink a few paces from my bed for when I needed to expel too many martinis.

End of an era...

I leave my job at Wallpaper* in two days time. There's a massive restructure going on and I applied for voluntary redundancy. My motivation for applying was primarily down to two things: firstly, the payoff. Secondly - six years in digital for one company is a long time, and I'd been thinking about when to make that leap into something invigorating and scary (as change is often scary). The timing couldn't have been better.

And it means that in a week or so, we'll have the funds to finally finish the house! There have been entire houses built from scratch in a fraction of the time it's taken to renovate this one [refer: Grand Designs]

The good news is, the builders gave me the quote today and it's only a bit over what I'd budgeted. My original plan of having the summer off might be curtailed if the cost of the renovation creeps up buy hey, I'll be a much happier human being having a proper wardrobe, a floor that doesn't creak and a bathroom that isn't embarrassing to show guests.

Even better news is they can start next week - not quite sure if that's feasible given that we'd have to empty the top floor of all our stuff - including the furniture - but if they can then I'll be able to tick one massive thing off my to do list when people ask me 'What's next?' - my answer has been pretty standard:  Have the summer off, finish the house and then find something exciting in digital - to that end, if you need my skills - I'm available for freelance, contract or permanent roles - my LinkedIn profile is here:
 http://uk.linkedin.com/in/kaymcmahon and if you work in marketing for a brand and you'd like to come to a workshop on Designing Disruption (in east London) I'm one of the speakers, details here: http://www.iabuk.net/events/library/designing-disruption

And I guess this means with building work imminent, at least this blog will get updated more regularly!

Shower doors

I can report that having a second (working) shower has been really useful. Having it's own water heating system means that both can run simultaneously without any problems. The one thing that made it a little tedious was having to squeegee down the floor after each shower and waiting for it to dry before using the loo or sink in there.

We had always planned to get doors in this room but as the size wasn't off the rack we'd need to get them custom made at a cost of around £700. For the sake of £700 my view was to endure a few months of sgueegee-ing. The builders said they might be able to find a cheaper supplier, somewhere around £500 but this didn't eventuate - and £500 + fitting was still going to be a bit of a whack on top of the already depleted bathroom fund.

Then Rob found a 90cm centre-opening bathroom door system on eBay - brand new for £90 including delivery. They arrived the next day. As the bathroom is 92.5cm wide it would mean having a 2.5cm panel or plinth on a wall to make up the shortfall, or putting in really wide rubber in the central join. Then Rob somehow had a genius brainwave and bought another bathroom door system the next available width up - 95cm. The builders fixed one half of the 90cm panels to the wall and one of the 95cm ones and lo and behold, it fits perfectly. You can't even tell that one of the panels is slightly wider as the sink & cupboard are in the way.

£180 worth of doors and £50 to install them means a £700+ job is done for £230! If you have a 92-93cm wide shower room and you need some doors we have a set here - get in touch.

These photos show the doors fitted and in action... The kids and I have had showers there this evening and there were no leaks or splashes even after three of us tried to make lots of mess. Happy days.

Wetroom progress

The black floor tiles have been laid and the wall tiles are on their way. The pipework has been installed, including a nifty thing that allows us to heat the back of the cabinet mirror - leading to a fog-free experience. The silver thing on the floor is the base of the shower drainer, and shows the line where the doors will open to. Did I mention this was a teeny tiny room?

I was having trouble with the idea of a regular shelf in the shower to hold shampoo and shower gel, but the builders are going to create an alcove in the wall instead. The power shower unit will sit next to the alcove, but can't be boxed in or it invalidates the warranty, boo. The sink arrived really quickly but must've been dropped as the entire corner was smashed. A replacement duly arrived the next day, but on closer inspection was designed to sit on a pedestal rather than being wall mounted. All sorted now, though I have to somehow get the wrong sink back to the Post Office.

Today the loo has been plumbed in and the heated towel rail has arrived. At this rate the whole job might be finished before Easter!

Cloakroom: before photos

For FOUR YEARS I have endured our 2.5 ghastly bathrooms after writing this naive post back in February 2008. If I'd known I'd be putting up with the status quo for so long I wouldn't have believed it. Turns out you can smile through aesthetic compromises when your circumstances are wobbled (refer redundancy, recession, unemployment then eventually catching up on many, many holidays...) Anyway. Here we are. And this is the first of the three bathroom spaces to get an overhaul. (The other two will be knocked through into one space at a later date, probably another four years at this rate).

I mentioned the space was quite tiny in my last post, but here you can see it with your own eyes. And yes, I am still keen on black tiles.

Here is the garage, with the washing maching and dryer hidden under an avalanche of goodness knows what. Probably the best news about having the builders in is the skip, which means we can have a proper chuck out of misc items. Especially the items left by the previous owners.

This is the view with the door to the cloakroom on the left and the door to the garage on the right.

This is the same view once the builders got stuck in.

And here is our old cloakroom space - one day of demolition means there's no going back now!

Phase 2 has lift off!

Right now there are two builders moving stuff from our garage into our dining room, prepping the spaces and organising the delivery of a skip. I can only compare the excitement to the feeling of anticipation one gets when pregnant: the unknown but ultimately thrilling possibility of something amazing is around the corner. But before then, will come a lot of mess, pain and money.

Last night I took some 'before' photos of the current spaces which I'll post here soon. It was difficult to get a good angle as the cloakroom is so small. Like, really really small. When we were imagining putting a shower in there we were originally going to steal back some space from either the outside storage cupboard, or from the under stairs storage. Neither of these options is happening now due to the cost.

The shower door will have to be made bespoke for the space so that it can fully open, that way when you're on the loo your knees won't be knocking against it.

At the weekend Rob and I went to Topps Tiles and chose the tiles which will end up on the walls and floor. I chose a 20cm square satin black tile for the wall and Rob chose the same tile in white for the floor. Me black, him white, it's kind of fitting. On reflection though, worrying about making the room look small when it IS small seemed silly - so we've ditched the white in favour of a dark grey. I'm guessing the size and colour will end up similar to the photo at top (via http://www.ffffound.com).

Phase 2 is imminent

Stardate: March 2012 - and I finally have some actual renovation to write about! This is in relation to the downstairs bathroom update and the implementation of a utility room. The builders came back with a quote, which was quite high, so we revised the plans to make it as simple as possible.

The quote was still too high but after some to-ing and fro-ing it looks like the building work, building materials and a separate water heating unit will cost £6,500 + VAT. We have to buy all the sanitary ware, tiles and extras (heated towel rail, laundry shelving etc) but it looks like the builders can start work next week.

I'm quite liking black tiles - not sure how they'll feel in a small wetroom, but after years of looking at white tiles I feel like a change.

In other news: there was a weird sound coming from our Samsung side-by-side fridge freezer. Turns out it was the fan hitting ice. It took less than 24 hours for the fan to grind to a halt and start overheating. Luckily (?) this happened while we were hosting a lunch at ours rather than say, the middle of the night or while we were away for the weekend. Rob quickly defrosted the fridge with our handheld steamer, and viola, the fridge is working fine again. The fridge is less than four years old and I had no idea it got icy - and we know a few people with the same fridge. Let this be a warning to ensure you defrost yours from time to time...

Enter the dragon

Chinese New Year came around quickly - January 23rd, the last two years it's been in February. Serves me right for suggesting we launch a work project to co-incide with Chinese New Year, but thankfully despite the the tight time frame it launched OK.

Another project I want dealt with before the Chinese New Year is out is our downstairs bathroom/utility room, but it's early February and still not much to report. The builders came back with a quote of £8k but this could've escalated depending how difficult it is to find waste pipes under the concrete. We've decided to go back to Plan A which is to expand the existing downstairs cloakroom to accommodate a shower, and separate the utility room from the garage. The builders popped round last night and discussed plumbing some more, and suggested ways of improving the water pressure so now we're waiting on a revised quote.

In the meantime, winter has finally kicked in with the current outdoor temparature at -3 degrees (Celcius). It might even snow at long last. Great time for the boiler to start leaking everywhere - it's got a condensation pipe that's not attached properly any more (deteriorating sealant or something?). I've been texting the guy who installed it all day but he's busy. And it's Saturday tomorrow, eep. (Pictured: the canal near our house, with ice!)

This morning this fluffy fox was right up against the glass doors peering in. I showed him my (vintage) rabbit fur coat and mouthed 'You're next' and he promptly walked to my rosemary bush, lifted a leg and pissed on it. I feel a fox war coming on.

Back to the drawing board

Procrastinators unite! We finally got the builders round this week to check out our plans with a view to getting a quote. A previous post referred to putting the bathroom into the existing garage, and creating a utility room in the current cloakroom.

The builders saw the waste pipe two feet off the ground and said that it was all possible (good) but that there would be cost implications (bad). If we wanted to run the new waste pipe from the shower and loo it requires a pipe of a certain size, and we'd have to join it up with the existing pipework which would mean finding it under the floor and checking it's suitability. This would cost anything up to £2,000 depending how much digging was required. Plan B was to put in totally new pipes and run them into the outside drainage system, but this requires permission from the council, which would take time and the cost for getting the permission is £500 before any digging gets underway.

Plan C is to stick with the configuration we've got and shoehorn a shower in there. It means we'll end up with something a little less spacious and probably more like a wet room. As I don't think anyone is fond of dealing with a shower-splashed loo, we'll need to put a screen in there but as the room is so narrow (less than a metre) it's going to be a bit of a challenge.

Pictured at top is a teeny basin, which in all likelihood is about the size of what we'll end up getting. Hopefully we can sort out a new layout/plan and get a quote before Christmas, so we can worry about the cost and mess over the festive season...

Visualising the new bathroom

OK it's not as bad as I thought. For some reason I'd convinced myself we'd been here for four years and I'd put up with the old bathrooms and very limited wardrobe space for a ridiculous length of time.

On closer inspection, it's coming up to three years. I had a three-year gap between kids as that was about the right amount of time to forget the horror of popping out a newborn. Renovating is similar. I'll be pretty chuffed it we can get the next part of the downstairs renovation done in the next few months, so it means we can gear up for the top floor project (eventually).

Rob made a 3D drawing of where stuff will go in our downstairs bathroom - it's not representative of the actual things that will end up there, but we wanted to show the builders the layout and spacing. It's a bit tricky to do that while staring into the current room as there are so many boxes, a washing machine, dryer and overspill from the kitchen cupboards. (Seriously - if we got hit by more riots/severe snow etc I wouldn't need to leave the house for weeks).

The builders are busy until mid-January at the earliest, but we're keen to get them round to do a quote soon so we know what we're in for.

If you want to see a truly inspirating before-and-after renovation project, go and 'like' Hotel Lautner on Facebook - it's now a drool-inducing mid-century eye-popping design fest, check out the early photos to see how it used to look. I'm a fan of John Lautner's iconic architecture - and the new owners of this hotel have done an amazing thing. Below is a photo of one of their renovated bathrooms, I hope there are similar tiles at Topps Tiles...

Downstairs revamp

Our downstairs configuration has been a topic of conversation lately. It turns out the current cloakroom isn't big enough for the Roca toilet and sink combo. Rob then had the genius idea of swapping everything around - moving the shower/loo/sink into what was going to be our utility room, and moving the washer and dryer into our current cloakroom (NB cloakroom is what the British call a small toilet, usually positioned under the stairs).

It's such an obvious solution I can't think why we didn't come up with it in the first place. It might be because the stack (plumbing arrangement involving large pipes) is about two feet up the wall - which might be tricky when plumbing in a loo and shower waste pipe. I'm sure there's a solution - maybe smashing up the floor until we find the outgoing pipe and joining it up there. Additionally we'll need a dedicated hot water system - gas or some kind of electric pump - otherwise the top floor bathroom will have no pressure when the downstairs one is in use.

As the room will have no natural light we'll need to consider lighting, and of course heating and venting out the steam. For inspiration I quite like these two bathrooms - large slate tiles and a glass shower door - practical.

(Both photos via housetohome.co.uk)

Phase two plans

Image: Joanopolis House, Sao Paulo from wallpaper.com

Two years after the work started on the house, we've finally finished phase one. And now I'm thinking (vaguely) about phase two. I must admit my passion for getting this project finished is diminished somewhat but next door's build only went a month or two over schedule. Their Polish builders were superb, so we swapped numbers and I said I'd send through some drawings so they could quote for them when we get motivated about, well, saving.

Phase two was going to involve knocking the downstairs loo through to the under stairs storage area and putting in a wet room. But this isn't practical for lots of reasons - the location of the soil pipes, the plumbing costs, having to tank the room so it doesn't leak etc etc. The Polish builder suggested putting a shower into our utility room, which doesn't exist at the moment as the washing machine and dryer inhabit a wall in the garage/bike store room.

So Phase two now means fitting a solid wall in the garage, putting in a proper ceiling and floor, lining the walls, putting in a shower and a sink and tarting it up with some tiles etc. And then giving the existing downstairs toilet a makeover so that it doesn't look like a bad 80s flashback (as it does now).

Phase three is the top floor, phase four is the garden. By then I reckon I'll be shopping round for a happening retirement village...

(I couldn't find any suitable inspirational photographs of utility rooms or under stairs storage so here's a lovely home in Sao Paulo that would be my inspiration for a holiday home...)