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Finishing Off

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There was quite a bit of work to do to finish off the bathroom and the little laundry nook. I turned my attention to the laundry doors which of course were not a standard size. Being a major tight-arse (and trying to see just how much we could save doing most of the work ourselves) I balked at getting the laundry doors custom made. So, I bought 2 standard doors that were only 40mm too wide and cut them down myself. Easy! Well...actually very fiddly and it took a day and a half to alter the 2 doors. In the end, I reckon I saved about $280 doing it this way and since no one pays me for my labour anymore I suppose it's not a bad return, all things considered! Then there was the painting (ceiling throughout plus two walls in the laundry) plus the new main bathroom door and the two bi-fold doors for the laundry - which I decided would look great done in white gloss. Dumb dumb dumb! Painting in progress Painting - first coat on the laundry walls before the cornice is installed  ...
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Tiling and Fitout - Part One

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The tiling was done over a couple of days - and not by me! We got several quotes from tilers - strangely enough most of whom were extremely busy doing reno work for other people also in lock-down during the pandemic. We wanted to use Gary - the tiler who did the tiling for our upstairs reno - unfortunately, he had just fallen down some stairs and injured his back. Strike one! Our next option was Danny - our neighbour from the house behind us, who came highly recommended as a tiler who did quality work . His quote was great and well within our budget but...he couldn't do the job for about 10 weeks! Strike two. Not wishing for a third strike, we settled on a tiler who did work for the store where we bought the tiles. His work was OK, especially since we didn't have to do it! He worked with an apprentice and probably did the work in about one tenth the time it would have taken us. The feature wall tiles in the shower enclosure (after we'd installed the shower itself, the mixer...
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The Fitout - Part Two

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After getting the vanity and toilet installed, the bathroom part was mostly usable. There was no shower screen so the shower was not a goer, but with the instantaneous gas water heater that serves the downstairs area slowly dying (only heating water to about 30 degrees celsius) the family visiting for the hols would have to shower upstairs. We primed the edges of the bathroom door and hung it so they would have some privacy and after we installed all the accessories like towel rails, mirror, light fittings and the like we had a usable, if unfinished bathroom. Vanity, accessories, mirror and light fitting installed Two weeks later, the shower screen was ready and the guys from Kiama Glass came and installed the screen. Once we sort out the hot water issue, we will have a fully working bathroom. The shower area with screen installed We now turned our attention to the fiddly bits - trim, laundry fitout, painting etc.
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Waterproofing the Wet Areas

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Because modern bathrooms don't have as much fall (or slope) on the floors as those in days gone by, new bathrooms have waterproof membranes installed in wet areas to make sure that water splashed around or in a shower goes where it should - down the drain and not, for example, out into a living room or carpeted area. Waterproofing membrane comes as a thick liquid in big tubs and is sort of painted/smeared onto the surfaces requiring waterproofing. In our case, the membrane product was bright blue - as were my clothes after the job was done. Anne also had a similar experience when she was applying the tile grip product to the old tiled and painted surfaces. The grip product has fine sand-like stuff suspended in a gluey liquid. Using a roller meant that this stuff splattered out as it rolled and Anne was covered in fine grains of gritty stuff glued to her, her clothes, the roller, the ladder - and everything else with a radius of 1.5 metres of her - ideal for social distancing! The ...
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The Start of the Re-build

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The first part of the rebuild was to add a new bed of mortar to the rough concrete floor. The new screed bed of mortar just after it was put down. The new mortar bed had to cure for two weeks before we could think about tiling the floor. This gave us time to work on the new walls. As we were moving the washing machine from beside the old vanity to the other side of the bathroom and into a partitioned off area, we needed a way to get services to the new laundry. There was a power point in the proposed new laundry area, but we needed to get hot and cold water to it and some way to get the waste water into the sewerage system. We had considered burrowing through the wall behind the new laundry but that's straight into the back of the kitchen cupboards and there wasn't enough clearance for the pipes behind the cupboards. Plan B was more elegant - but a lot more work. We built a new stud wall against the existing brick wall of the bathroom and ran the services through that. It meant...
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The Need to Renovate

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Renovating a Bathroom During Covid19 Lockdown Hi All I've composed a couple of blogs over the past several years - mainly to inform friends about the major renovation of our current home and about our overseas trips. By comparison, this is only a very short blog comprising mainly photos of the current project as it progressed from demolition of the old bathroom to construction of the new. We've been meaning to update this old bathroom since we completed the upstairs reno but things kept getting in the way. We've put in a new ceiling in the downstairs (the area we call "the flat") and painted throughout - but the bathroom was always the "we'll do that one day" thing. We had removed the old wallpaper and painted the un-tiled parts of the bathroom walls but that was about it. The bathroom incorporated a laundry of sorts - a washing machine plumbed into the side of the vanity unit (very poorly I might add with exposed copper pipes and waste water inlet),...
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The Demolition

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Here are some photos as we started the demolition of the old bathroom. The old bathroom with the vanity removed - washing machine & toilet still in place. The shower screen removed. Fun with a 5kg sledge hammer A shower recess no more - just a pile of rubble The toilet went the same way as the shower walls - smashed with the sledge hammer and loaded into a trailer for recycling as building material. The floor after the little mozaic tiles and under-screed were jack hammered up. The wall where the vanity and toilet used to be after the tiles had been jack hammered off Of course we discovered problems - mainly with the old 40 year old plumbing. All the demolition work caused some of the fittings to give up the ghost and start leaking! More jack hammer work! A leaking copper fitting This necessitated jack hammering a big hole in the the wall and re-routing the plumbing. It also meant that we couldn't use the existing shower outlet but would have to come up with an alternative to h...
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