The bathroom was the hardest room of the bungalow to be completely finished. At the time of writing, other areas of the house are at varying levels of progress, so I will write about those as we complete them.
Annoyingly I don’t have a complete “before” photo of how the bathroom looked when we started, but the below photo is probably a good enough proxy…
There was a bath and sink in here when we started but they were really nothing spectacular, so imagine the above photo with those things in and some green tiles and carpet and you have your “before” shot.
Once all the old bathroom fittings were removed, there was the task of removing a frieze right at the top of the walls. This was an extremely dated feature and just had to go. Out came a steamer and a scraper… and a mess on the floor as it all came right off.
Then we could start with ripping out the old toilet and then begin plumbing in the new bath. We really wanted one with the tap and plug hole in the middle like you find on a double ended bath tub, but this proved difficult to find with the dimensions we needed. Eventually though, we found this one.
In this photo you can also see some of the floor tiles that were laid. We went with slate tiles.
Then we tiled the walls with white subway tiles. It was important to keep the room as bright as possible as, like the kitchen, there are no exterior windows. The window you can see has an extension the other side of it, where the utility room was built.
Grouting, as it always is, was an AWFUL job. It gets everywhere, and goes off quickly too so there’s never much time to get going once you’ve got some lying around.
Once all the tiling was done, it was a case of trying to get the toilet in. The plumbing was difficult due to things very slightly being in annoying places, for example the hole in the floor being placed just that the pipe from the cistern was just a little bit too short. Off to B&Q I went to get a new one.
Once we had the walls painted, the shower installed, a new wall cabinet put up and the shower screen in place, the room was ready for staging (to be shown in full in the final blog post of this house).
The walls were done in the same colour as the rest of the house – the Valspar mix of Farrow & Ball’s Pavillion Grey.
And that’s that. I’ll share more photos of this place at the end once everywhere has been staged. It’s clear though that this is one of the hardest rooms to do, and that’s very common with renovations. It’s worth it though, as it’s true what they say when bathrooms and kitchens sell houses. They are critical areas where you can’t really cut corners without paying prices later on that mean you might as well have taken the time to just do it properly in the first place.
We felt like we were really getting somewhere when this was done, though. On to the next part of the house…
Lx
The Norfolk Home Diaries 