Tales From the Box

I am guilty as charged. Yes – throw your hurls of abuse – as a designer renovator and manchild, I took the easy way out. Rather than go through the whole “tiles, basin, toilet, fittings..” thing.. we simply hit the repeat button and used the same of everything from our first bathroom reno to our second. Because of our low ceiling height were were quite particular to duct the ceiling cavity in order to stop any mould and dampness that would buildup there. Remember that simply exhausting your bathroom into your roof cavity isn’t the smartest idea if you then don’t vent the cavity itself. Many a perceived dampness problem can be directly attributable to this very setup.

We also utilised some spare areas underneath the stairs to create an interior laundry. Initially this was going to be part of Bathroom 2 – but to make better use of space and walls, we made it an external access cupboard type laundry and is working a treat at the moment.

Its been awhile – but here they are – a painted (only one coat at this stage – too many other things to do) bathroom in all its white goodness (not that other shades can’t be good – but white means good – or death…depends which interpretation you want – we will stick with good).

Anyway some groovy bendy fisheye pics for youse all (apologies to all those hereby offended by the youse – i was merely trying to relate to the baser of the readership..)

(N.B apologies to all those people offended by the ‘baser’ slander. It was in appropriate of me and i regret its use. If i have caused grief to your moronic brains then i am truly sorry)

Because we are extending underneath our current bathroom, we had to give due consideration to the clearance of the waste and drain pipes. Before the bathroom reno – the pipes were quite deep – which initially made our architect plan for some bulkhead that would be build around them. But due to the fabulous work by our bathroom doctors – the pipes drainage pipes were set shallow enough so that they wont affect the head-space (or my head-space for that matter) downstairs beneath the bathroom. We also opted to a p-trap toilet with meant the toilet waste (the bad stuff) went out the wall rather than the floor. This was the same for the vanity too.

Huzzah! Our vanity is in and installed. We opted for the more expensive but cooler looking vanity (Cogee model by Blue Australia bathrooms) which was a wall mounted model (i.e. it doesn’t sit on the floor but magically ‘floats’). In the pics below you can also see our tap choice which was the Sabine range by Linkware.

Today we saw a return of the floor – the kruddy textures of the previous surface have been smoothed over (very Ponds Institure like) and covered with our lovely non-descript greeny, browny, grey-ey coloured tile.

Now for the cream on top of the pudding that is this bathroom reno.. – for the rest of the week – lighting, vanity, toilet (v. important), fixtures and finally a warm bath (sorry no podcast available for that…). Here is the best snap I could get tonight – tommorrow I will post a video.

One cold Saturday morning, where the air was crisp, and the breeze was cool, a team of tilers ventured into a small room – filled with bare gyprock and a bath floating precariously on a bed of hebel cement blocks.

4 hours later – the bathroom starts to resemble something of familiarity.

Walls are up – waterproofing is down. Tiling starts tommorrow!

And so it is – as always – walls come down and walls come up….

Yeah I have no idea what to say – apart from my own feelings that gyprock rocks…..!

(i know – terribly sad….)

Okay the bath is in! We opted for a classic styled bath, or as the brochure so eloquently put it – a ‘modern’ bath. What is modern anyway? Oh yes – modern refers to the modern era – a period which started in the mid 18th century. Oh – how specific! Considering that the ‘modern’ ye olde clawfoot bath was replaced with the ‘modern’ sleek space-aged fiberglass bath in the latter half of last century – I reckon that the brochure is fractionally broad with its categorising. But hey… it was probably written by junior, hypermodern, office temp..

Day 2 and the destruction has stopped. Gone are the sounds of jackhammers and the shrill exclaims of breaking tiles.

Wiring and plumbing are in order – and there is a fair amount to do. To put it simply our old bathroom was the worst possible configuration that one could actually think of. However this didn’t leave us much to work with. So we pretty much started again.

Our shower/bath area has traded corners with the vanity.

Who knows what tommorrow with bring – some more info re: waste plumbing. How exciting!