The big story at the house this weekend was plumbing.
When the house was originally built it had an outdoor toilet, and was more recently extended to include a downstairs bathroom and separate toilet.
It all looks a bit grim, but actually since these rooms are in the more modern extension they’re warm enough, and the plumbing (mostly) works so it’s definitely sufficient for now.
The plan now is to move the bathroom upstairs, which is going to take a lot of work. Starting with gutting the room that has been one of the bedrooms:
The floorboards had to come up so that all the joists across the floor could be reinforced (the weight of tiles and bath and ceramics is much more than would normally be found in the average bedroom) and then began the task of leveling. Unsurprisingly, the floor isn’t exactly square; the decades have allowed it to sag in towards the strongest supports and none of that exactly lends itself to a successful bathroom.
The leveling was achieved by the simple method of placing other pieces of board and timber along the joists, adjusting all the while using a spirit level and then placing very thick plywood boards on top to create a sturdy, flat surface that we should be able to tile without too much difficulty. As with so many DIY jobs, the method was simple, but in practice it took quite a long time to get it all perfect! (I should probably clarify here that I wasn’t involved in this particular task – my husband and dad did this bit while I was off jointing plasterboard elsewhere. I’m forever getting in trouble for mis-telling my stories…)
And then there was the problem of the pipes. Since this room has been a bedroom for a long time – and before that the property was two little cottages and it was the stairs in one of them – there’s no water running in to it, and no waste pipes from it.
The bathroom floor isn’t deep enough to run the pipes through, and the best option is to run the waste pipes from the shower, bath and basin through the living room. One thing we already have in place is a RSJ in the front room, which is the shape of a capital ‘I’ so we’ve been able to slot supports for the pipes into it:
…run the pipe from the bath through them, then box it back in with plasterboard. This seemed like a genius idea, but it doesn’t look very neat right now. There’s also the worry that we’ll be able to hear the gurgling of water going through the living room if the bath is drained, but we’ve stuffed the cavity around the pipe with fibre glass insulation, and that’ll probably deal with that, right?
The pipe from the shower and basin needs to run down the other side of the room, though, so we had to create our own pipe box. This involved cutting out a new set of supports:
And mounting the pipes:
There was minimal shoving and heaving to get the lengths into position, then it was a simple matter of my husband going out into the garden and tossing the garden hose up to me in the bathroom so that we could test the system.
I hope I needn’t have been so surprised, but it went without a hitch and I was amazed! No gigantic water fountain springing up; in fact, no leaks at all. (I am aware that a drainage pipe has no pressure on it whatsoever, so it would be physically impossible to spring a cartoon-style spurting leak, but it’s still what I picture every time I have to test anything to do with the waterworks!)
This means that we are getting to the stage where we will be in a position to fit our bathroom furniture. Some of it is already ordered (to be delivered in three weeks so we’d better get a move on!), some things still need to be picked out – the bath is a prime example, though I have ideas! – and there is one thing that we already have:
The lovely oak basin stand with ‘his and hers’ sinks. I can’t wait to have this up and running so that I can prove once and for all to my husband that all the mess in our bathroom is caused by him. I’m picturing my sink pristine and sparking, and pure carnage on his side. He seems to think he will be taking a mix-and-match approach to sink usage, but he has no idea how much that isn’t going to happen…
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