fitting bathrooms

[weargas]

nothing but an observation

I can't believe how much work is involved

when i used to fit bathrooms i always felt as though i was banging my head against a wall whilst trying to explain to the customer that a bathroom is not just, as they put it, a straight swap.

 

[AdamW]

Doing a DIY bathroom at the moment, luckily being an analyst I have a pedantic urge to plan projects and include contingencies etc. Not to mention I took a decent amount of time off work rather than just try to do it over a bank holiday weekend! Even so, it is usable but by no means complete. Need to remove the sink, refit the waste (it is leaking from the bottom, around where the sink's built-in waste meets it), plaster the new ceiling, fit the new lights, box in pipes, fit the new heated towel rail, do 20 sq metres of tiling, fit bath panel, fit the shower mixer to the outlets, get a bath screen, install the floor... etc. etc. It goes on!

But yes, there is a lot of work to do even if you are putting the new components exactly where the old ones went. However I have discovered the wonder that is flexible pipes.

My bath cradle was designed such that it was just not possible to fit 4 water pipes (2 for bath, 2 pumped for the shower) AND a 40mm waste pipe (sink and washing machine) between the cradle and the wall, short of running the waste up and down all over the place (which kinda defeats the object of a gravity drainage system!)

I ended up using a 30cm flexible waste pipe to scoot around between the cradle and the bath. So, my waste pipes are by the wall and the bath still fits.

 

[llykstw]

My problem was that I had to remove a partition wall simply to take the old bath out, and then make good the walls to a vaguely reasonable standard. Plus the rest of the part-tiled walls had to be made flat for new tiles to be applied. Then the new pipework, assemble the new fittings and remove the old ones, instal the new floor and repair any broken floorboards, stop leaks in the new pipes and fittings, build boxed-in sections around bath, and tile. It's exhausting just listing it all.

 

[AdamW]

Yours sounds exactly like mine! I took out a stud wall because it was divided into toilet and bath room, plus a sink room. I used cement board on the walls which would get wet, after ripping off the tiles. And plasterboard on the walls that wouldn't. The wall was absolutely rotten at the bottom: 20 years of water leaking into it had turned the wood into soil!

I forgot to add the extra task of cutting a new doorway into a wall for airing cupboard access

A bathroom takes a lot of work, but I am sure it will be worth it in the end (touch wood!).

Oh, and nowhere did I ever read that pulling the old toilet pan away from the wall would result in stinky water getting on my bathroom floor!

 

[weargas]

Oh, and nowhere did I ever read that pulling the old toilet pan away from the wall would result in stinky water getting on my bathroom floor!

were you expecting Chanel number 5?

 

[AdamW]

Well, it wasn't the stinky water on the floor that annoyed me so much. I expected a bit of grime. But (and perhaps I should stick this in DIY Disasters) I inadvertently brushed my trouser leg against the dirty end of the somewhat skanky pan.

I was driving to and from the builder's yard for 2 days wondering what the smell was, I thought it was the car!

 

[peter anderson]

my first experience with removing a toilet resulted in blobs of faeces on my friend's beige carpet. Fortunately faeces carpet doesn't stain carpet if you wash and rub it quickly enough.

Red faeces all round!