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!