The Bathrooms
Chris had two weeks holiday in August. The plan was to get rid of our old vanity basin and cabinet in the main bathroom, patch up the wall, put in a new vanity and a nice big funky mirror. We thought this should be doable in two weeks...Pictured above is Chris the Destructor, pulling the old vanity apart. He had fun doing that!
We decided that we needed to pull the old tiles off and replace them with a "feature" section of tiling. It took three days of visiting tile shops to find something that almost matched the colour of the old tiles. We figured mosaic sheets would be easier to lay for novices - not sure if we figured that correctly! Chris had to time his banging on the wall so that it didn't wake up the baby next door. Keira didn't have a problem sleeping through the banging, but other babies must be a bit more fussy. Between coffee breaks down the street and other distractions it took about two or so days to get the old tiles off the wall.
The next step was to put the tile adhesive on the wall. You can see where the old mirror and cabinet were above the tiles. We also had to remove the old wall heater and re-wire the powerpoint. Chris had to lay it the tile adhesive on really thick to bring the new tiles up to the height of the old ones. This meant that the adhesive oozed through the tiles when we put them on the wall, and then we had the fun of trying to get them to be straight. In the end Chris decided that a post-modern approach to the tiles would do. The end result is below (and doesn't look too bad).
The next tricky part was the plumbing. We got the vanity for a good price but didn't realise until we got home that the waste pipe was directly under the drawers. You may ask why we have a vanity that is smaller than the space - well this is because the space is a non-standard size. The previous vanity was built-in when the unit was constructed and we can't get anything ready-made the actually fits the space. So we went for something smaller and I will put something arty in the corner, or a basket or something. Any plumbers will appreciate Chris' inventiveness - and he even put in a polpypipe corner in memory of all the work he did with polypipe in PNG! The above plumbing work was finised last Friday - three weeks after we started and the last day Chris had before going to PNG on Sunday. Since then I have repainted the walls and ceiling and am painting the grout on the old tiles so they look fresh and new also. My next job is to get a nice big mirror in a suitable frame (something rustic to suit the overall rough look I think!).During all this fun our fridge died, which lead Alesia to tell Darshna at Family Day Care that she had no basin in her bathroom and no fridge in the kitchen. I am still waiting for the fridge to be fixed now.
The next room to do is our ensuite. I pulled the old cabinet off the wall and found this - imagine a whole bathroom in it! It is almost so bad to be trendy again. So now I have to teach myself how to get wallpaper off.
