Don't do what I did ...

... clean the house from top to bottom then get the builders in! All the hard work has to be done again and it's even harder due to the thick layer of brick dust.

So, we've had the builders in to do our bathroom. Here's a before piccie:

Actually, it doesn't look too bad does it, but it seriously needed some work. Look out for the wash basin on ebay soon, it's in lovely condition.

When we bought our new home we knew we'd need to do some work to this room. The previous occupiers admitted that their DIY wasn't too good and that they'd laid floor tiles on chipboard and hadn't done a good job of putting new tiles on the wall. The builders (our family have known and used them for a long time) weren't too sure what they'd find behind both set of tiles and and by the end of the first day of builder's chaos we discovered rotten joists and very wet walls! Every pipe, it seems, had been leaking (for how long we don't know) and the shower tray plug hole didn't have a washer so that too had been leaking badly.

End of day 1. The concrete floor under the new joists was really wet and all the pipes plastic had to be replaced with copper.

End of day 2. New flooring and walls reading for tiling.

Luckily the walls, although pretty bad, weren't going to take much to fix. They stripped all the old chipboard and polystyrene covering off back to the breeze-block in order to put up moisture-resistant boarding reading for new tiles.

Rather than risk putting the spacious shower tray, surround and shower back, we decided to play safe (to avoid future un-noticed leaks) and put in a bath suite. Ordering this from W...kes, as a take away suite, took an amazing hour and a half to do! Seeing as how I wanted to take the boxed up bits (toilet and basin), which was ready boxed and sitting by the pay desk, and get the builders to collect the bath, it shouldn't have taken that long surely!?

So, a week's worth of hard work from two fabulous builders and the end result (hard to capture in a photo) looks brilliant and very spacious.

Just need to paint the rest of the room to finish it off.

Must say a huge thank you to "M" and family for kindly lending me the porta-loo from her caravan. Won't go into too much detail but those who've used these before know how brilliant they are and very easy to use and empty. Hower, not wanting to empty the chemicals into the septic tank I had to strain the wet stuff off into a bucket to leave the gorey stuff behind! Not a pleasant task especially as it was chucking it down outside so I had to do all this indoors without sufficient ventilation. It took a while to work out the best way of doing what I needed to do - P was just so lucky to have missed all this, he times his business trips abroard very well. I'm amazed by how much poo a family can produce! Actually, to tell you the truth I was more amazed at the amount of loo roll that had been used, think I'll have to have a chat with the kiddies!

Yep, that's the cat's feeding bowl poor thing, but it's not as bad as it seems, the porta-loo didn't really smell during daily use.