A bit more on our house renovation adventure for your amusement.
It's a long post but then it has been a long journey to be fair and one that's still ongoing. It's not a bragging thread, don't get me wrong I'm proud of what we've achieved, but more a cathartic request for empathy in what's been the most traumatic time of my life
After the log-burner went in and we had some way of heating the place we started to work through the winter to get the house ready to move into. This was deep-covid, so winter before this one, around September time. We'd actually been committed to the house for over a year already at this point but had spent the first year of covid locking horns with the auction company and the useless seller who had ended up with the house after the two previous owners had died. :Honestly, no shit D
Anyway that's when we eventually started on the bathroom and the cottage's plumbing
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Shortly before we got the keys in August some kind fuckers broke in and cut most of the copper pipework out and flooded the place. We'd of pulled out at this pint but we'd of lost a fair bit of stodge and our landlords wanted us gorn so they could "maximise their earning potential" from our current gaff.
.
You can see where they cut out the copper tank out in this pic., hardly a professional job. It's the only one I took of the bathroom before I hit it with the old Irish technician in me.
There we no images of the bathroom in the auctioneers prospectus and there was a reason for that. It was shite.
It needed a full rip out but incidentally we've kept the shocking pink suite for a project we intend to do in the garage at a later date. But honestly the bathroom itself was quite rank, with mice, woodworm, woodlice, damp and dodgy electrics as well as lead plumbing all round. The house had been empty for 6 years at this point however, there was still an old lady's log, or a burgalurs twitch one in the u-bend when I pulled the throne out
I spent about 5 weeks of hell in this room.
Every night after work, mostly on my knees, I turned up and got stuck in.
I had to cut the rust-welded, cast iron bath legs off with an angle-grinder in order to get the fucker out the door and then we had to quarter it with the grinder and a sledgehammer to get it down the stairs.
Fuck knows how they got it in there originally, it weighed a ton.
Narnia, when she wasn't WFH, doing Joe Wicks and home schooling my teenage monster, was turning up every other night on rubble bag filling duty and scrap metal separating; as well as queen of the brews and biscuits. The teenager came a few nights but it wasn't "his thing man" until I said we could sleep over and do some vodka shots.
The police came round that night at 2 am and asked me to turn the music down because they were in the pub car park next door and they could hear it. No one had complained though.
You can imagine my crime busting response when I asked them about our previous plumbing's disappearance and their stake out positioning that night.
Anyway, the bath eventually came out and the project was on.,
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Once the rip out was done I had to figure how to get a bog, basin, bath and shower in the smallest bathroom in the village.
They say you should measure twice and then cut once but I agonised so much over the design of this room. Every time I planned where everything would go I would sleep on it and realise the following day that it wasn't possible. It fucking vexed me to the pint of distraction.
My plan was to lose all the waste-pipe under the floorboards and then I took one up to find that some time in the 1980's a builder had put some RSJ's in to replace the original rotten oak beams. These ran an inch under the boards and 90 degrees to the joists. Then I had a eureka moment and changed the configuration completely only to find out that the cast iron soil pipe ran through the wall and was concealed in a roof void that I hadn't noticed until I took the lead collar off expecting to see daylight and a y bend only to find some bats hibernating. I didn't mention this to the listed building planning person but I swear the bats were never fucked with, honest.
Once this became apparent before I could even think about how the bog was going to flush the old lady's log out I had to re-site the soil pipe and make a hole in the wall so close to the corner of the building it was in the realms of dodge it and bodge it, chuck it and fuck it territory. That's when I ordered some
proper power tools . This became a theme from then on and we went full DeWalt, which given how the bathroom was going, made so much sense as we moved on to the other nightmare rooms in the house.
Wait till you see what we found in the kitchen. .
Once I had the blue print for how the shit would flow out and the water would run in we then set on deciding on a suite within our tight budget that would give us what we have always wanted. A bathroom that is ours.
Unfortunately though that's when the main difference of opinion emerged it's ugly head. It would seem that cascade taps and cuboid toilets with hidden cisterns were what Kirsty and Angle Strawbridge were suggesting to my us both via my wife and youtube. But then they "didn't have to fit those fucking things themselves did they Julie?" and breath. Eventually we agreed on a suite with 45% off from victoria scum after Narnia realised that none of us had a square bum and my fat fingers would turn a cascade tap into the Niagra falls.
Once the 48hr delivery box of nightmares was delivered and I tried to figure what the fuck went with what Narnia got to work on smacking off the pink tiles I eventually got to work on building the shower. I spent most of this time desperately trying not to put a hammer through the shower tray that oddly cost more than the bog and the sink put together.
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Even building that was hard fucking work. I'm going on now but I did tell you it's cathartic driven.
There's not a single right-angle in this house, not in any room. It's like a rhombus, the whole place is built skewiff, as my dad would say, like some Welsh builder knew that some English prick would buy it in 250 years time time and he'd be fucked lost trying to use his B & Q 90/45 saw mitre.. Even the floor boards ran 77 degrees to the walls. I had to tile it on an angle that made my eyes boggle because the back wall where the bath had to be sited was 23 degrees to the rest of the room.
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Anyway as any other home renovation DIY'er will know the first rule of renovation club is get the shitter working and the floor tiled. After bleaching out the dunny bucket so I could mix the grout, the walls were given the Scottish method of plastering. Tung-an-groove!
Eventually, after a lot of fucking about with waste pipe's that were only used in the Ukraine and finding that special washer that didn't arrive with the suite (Thanks Victoria Scum) , we were ready for our first bath.
Well we would of done if we had boiler.
It looked nice though and we could dream
Here's one I ran earlier but much later in reality.
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If you're interested I'll bore you with the rest of what we've been up to before we moved in in March this year.
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