Advice from a professional

We finally bit the bullet, and decided to get a professional round to have a look at the bathroom project. He agreed that we were in a difficult situation with the ceiling, and also that we had the right idea with regards the direction of the bath over the joists.

However, he has said that any spark who looks at our electrics will suddenly develop the 2mm gap between his front teeth for making that whistling sound when he draws breath upon seeing something he doesn't like. To install an electric shower, we would need to get a spark in to install the power ring for it - and that would have meant replacing the consumer unit. The whole thing would spiral out of control and we'd end up having to have the whole building re-wired. We can't afford that. Personally I'd like to have got the bank we bought the house from to do the wiring to bring it up to scratch. But there you have it. So it looks like the nice easy job of putting an electric shower in is not going to happen.

The plumber we had round instead suggested installing a power shower instead. They are probably twice the price, and will involve a lot more plumbing. You have to use cold water from the tank, rather than cold from the mains. And I'm going to have to plumb the hot water straight off the tank, rather than off the 15mm pipe that runs conveniently past my bath and basin.

These guys describe the system far better than I can:
DIY Doctor: Powershowers

In the mean time I'm going to continue to fit the bath and basin, so we can fit the shower when we've got the money etc together to do the work.

Our professional also advised us to get a builder to do the soil pipes for the toilets. It's a messy job, and it's all got to be done to building regulations. What we have at the moment may not even be legal, as there's supposed to be an air vent - which we don't have.

Worryingly, he also suggested that the downpipe from the guttering was currently being directed straight into the ground, meaning all the rain water would end up in the foundations.

Cookers

Oh and before I forget:
Thanks to the guys over at Meon Gas who came out and fixed out cooker! The only bit that's now not working fully (and we're not fussed about this) is the middle ring won't light from the built in ignition system.

Turns out the oven thermostat had died - probably from all the grease etc all over it, and the heating element for the fan oven had died too. At a cost of £170 we now have a fully functional cooker, which would probably have cost us well over £600 to replace. To add to that, we'd pretty much built the kitchen round the cooker. It's a weird 700mm size - so we'd have ended up buying one that was only 600mm and had a big, very odd looking gap down the sides of the cooker. Good result

Bathrooms - a long road ahead

The bathroom is an interesting challenge. For some reason the roof is constructed in a funny way, resulting in a partially sloped ceiling in all of the rooms. Some would say because it was fashionable at the time, others (myself included) would say it was because it's cheaper to build them this way - you need less bricks to build up the walls. This is particularly irritating for several reasons:

1. The loft space is smaller, both in height and width.
2. If I were to ever try and stand up in the area at the head of my bed, I'll bash my head on the ceiling (fortunately won't ever happen :)
3. It makes locating the bath upstairs very difficult.

We can't put the bath along the wall I wanted to put it on, because the ceiling invades the space. We could build a box cupboard at the head of the bath, but then the foot of the bath would stick out too far and into the space where the stud wall is going to go. We can't put it along the wall where the stud wall will go, there's not enough space for the door and the bath. We can't put it along the other wall - there's a window there. Not too keen about the idea of showering by a window, even if we are eventually planning to block that window off. Leaving us with the last wall - and a slight crazy plan to build a long box cupboard along that wall the length of the bath. This has the added advantage that the bath will then be supported by three joists, close to the load bearing wall. So we're less worried about the bath crashing through the floor as my wife fills it with water. Don't laugh - apparently in some older houses it's been a problem!

Anyway - finally got the room cleared, and some floor boards up. Conveniently some of the boards have already been cut so its easy to see where pipes for some things are. But not all of them. I managed to break a few getting them up, which is annoying. I started on the plumbing and had a couple of disasters, and a couple of successes. We've decided to take the rather large (and very nice) towel radiator out of the toilet downstairs and move it upstairs, and move the radiator points out of the toilet and into the downstairs bathroom. There's a corner sink in the bathroom at the moment, which we're going to move into the toilet. This will free up some space in the bathroom for when we convert it into a study. The start of the disasters occurred first when I forgot to put flux on the pipe coming up into floor space from the new location for the radiator, resulting in a dry joint. So I had to take it all apart and resolder it, wasting half an hour or so.

I've disabled and hidden one of the power points, which would have been under the bath. The other I'm leaving for now so I've got access to power, but that too will have to disappear beneath the floorboards. I've worked out which is the hot and cold pipes, added tee pieces off them and run the pipes up to the wall. I've learnt how to bend pipes without kinking them too much. The idea is that you put a steel, dense spring down the middle of the tube to stop it from collapsing. You can then bend it over your knee or put it in a pipe bender. If I were a professional plumber I'd definitely invest in a pipe bender. It's a machine with a long lever and a gentle curved groove allowing you to bend pipes with relative ease and produce nice, good looking pipe work with a degree of accuracy I struggled to achieve by bending the pipe over my knee. Or you can cheat and buy solder ring obtuse angles - a piece of copper pipe moulded to 135 degrees. If I'd had a disaster with bending the pipes, I'd have probably gone over to using obtuse angle pieces. But the two I've bent worked out fine - so two successes :) The only problems occured when one of the pipes was a little too long so the bend was too close to the wall. But that was just a case of cutting the pipe a little shorter. I've added some ball taps to cut off the water to the bath/shower/basin supply in case in the future I need to change a washer or something - saves having to drain the whole system down. It also means I can pause with the development of the bathroom, without having to leave the whole house without hot or cold water.

We're stopping for until today to get a bathroom fitter in. Several things have occurred to us:

1. The bath will be directly over where the consumer panel is - and all the power to the rest of the house comes up right where the bath is. If there's a leak it'll drip down onto the live electrics. I need to know if that's going to be a problem!
2. The plan is to put an electric shower in. But electric showers draw a LOT of current and therefore must be on their own fuse in the consumer panel. We can do this one of two ways:


• Use the only space free which is currently labelled as the cooker ring - not that we use the cooker ring, we have a gas hob and electric oven. No need for a seperate ring
• We replace the consumer panel to include more fuses


I'd love to go for option 2 as we'll need to upgrade when we build the extension on the side of the house (whenever that will be). But it could get costly, especially if the spark sees a lot of problems with the existing wiring and may insist on a more extensive wire replacement program.

3. We also need to know about the soil stack for the toilet. Where can we put it? etc. The toilet has to go on the back wall. Otherwise, when we build the extension, we'll have to move it.
4. I need to get my friend Lau over at some point as I need to hire and use a power tool I've not used before - a diamond edged core drill designed to cut holes in walls so we can run the drains from the bath and basin. It's a rather expensive tool, which we're going to have to hire at the cost of £50 or so per day.

In other news, my wife and I have decided to put some decking off the kitchen. It's a rather large area, but it gets very little sun as it's a south facing house. The grass and other plants don't do very well round there, not helped we think by four teenaged boys living there before us! It has the added advantage that when we finally build the conservatory, we can always move the decking to another part of the garden.

And finally, we dug over the veggie patch yesterday afternoon. It's the first weekend when it's not been very frosty, snowing or raining. It was actually a pleasant afternoon - though my right shoulder and hands are feeling the effects this morning. At some point I'm going to have to install the replacement water butt. The current one (which is 210 litres) is full - we've have that much rain. So when I saw one in Wickes for £99 - at 700 litres I figured I might as well do the upgrade and move the 210 l one down to the house. When I got to the check out, I found out they'd further reduced it down to £49. Nice work if you can get it! Now I've just got to build a stand to put it on. The ground behind the shed is very sloped and when the water butt is full, I'm worried it will damage the shed by leaning on it!

Final stages of the kitchen ... and then the bathroom

The kitchen floor is almost finished. My wife finished the last few awkward tiles, and has now grouted the floor. It's a black tile floor, with grey grout. It looks fantastic when it's finished, but there is a problem. The grey grout takes months to wash off. The very fine cement it's made of shows up very well on the jet black tiles.

This weekend we start work on the upstairs bathroom. We've got to clear the room out first, take up the floorboards and see where the pipes etc are. There's a little electrical work to do - mainly taking out old electric points. And we've got a stud wall to fit. Got to get the bathroom suite delivered before we put the stud wall in though - I can just see us putting something through our nice shiny new plasterboard wall!

Sheds and laser guided power tools

Finally put the finishing touches on the roof of the shed yesterday. The roofing felt is all battoned down, and the guttering is fixed so it will start collecting rainwater for the veggie patch.

I'd seen an advert for a pillar drill on the internet from the supermarket Aldi (along with adverts for power winches - that shop sells the weirdest things!). No true workshop is complete without a pillar drill and a lathe. Well for £41 I figured I might as well get one of the boxes ticked. I went over there on Wednesday, only to discover that they weren't going to be available until Thursday. I was going out on Thursday evening, and Friday I was on an extended shift - so I wasn't going to be able to pick one up till yesterday (Saturday). So I went back over there in the morning - and they'd sold out and they weren't going to be getting any more in.

So I consoled myself by going to buy a new powered mitre saw. The other one had served me well. I'd put the kitchen together with it, and quite a lot of my wife's shop was put together with it. But it was on its last legs. The catch that pulled the blade guard up had broken off in the last throws of putting the kitchen together. Since then I had to make do with pulling the guard up by hand before making the cut. This struck me as being a rather dangerous situation. I'd seen first hand (pun intended!) what can happen if someone missuses one of these things. I figured it was time for an upgraded anyway, so I trotted over to the nearest B&Q, and bought a new one. One of the problems I'd had with previous incarnations of the mitre saw was that it was limited in how thick or wide a piece you could cut. You will always have some limitations - and they can easily be overcome with a handsaw. But I use the mitre saw so much, I figured why not kill two birds and get one with a bigger range of movement. And I have to say it's a pleasure to use. I bought the MacAllister £68 one, which has the blade gantry mounted on two sliding rails. One of the bugbears of previous mitre saws has been the difficulty with changing the angles the blade comes in at. They both had rather twiddly little knobs to lock down the turntable with. I either over tightened which made it difficult to loosen, or under tightened in which case the angle of the blade could change just as I was going to make the cut. Neither a great situation. The new mitre saw has a much larger handle right at the front, and the range of movement of the gantry is much wider - going out to 50 degrees where previously it would only go as far as 45. In addition it has a laser guide on it. Now I've always viewed laser guidance on powertools to be a bit of a gimmick which you could (or should) probably ignore. I retract that - at least with regards to the mitre saw. It has two laser lights, which I think need adjusting a little. But never the less it was considerably easier to build the new garden gate as a result of the lasers. The oblique strut supports had some odd angles, and it was reassuring to know exactly where the blade would fall as soon as I started. All in all - a good result.

Still want a pillar drill though.