Bathroom projects, and the improving weather

We finally got the money together to get the soil pipe done. I had two friends over, Paul and Lau, to help dig up the concrete where the existing soil pipe is. With the right tools it took us a day to dig the trench down the soil pipe. It turns out it's a clay pipe which had been repaired a couple of times over the years. This is now not up to regulations anyway, so the builders replaced the soil pipe with a plastic one, and ran the new soil stack up the side of the house. They've also installed a pipe leading into the new bathroom so the toilet can be fitted, with the waste for the bath and basin also leading into it. We're a little concerned the pipe is too high though and we might have some trouble with water back flushing into the bath! Time will tell. However, no more has happened in the bathroom as I've been waiting until April to get my new allocation of annual leave before I can tackle some of the larger problems.

In the mean time the weather has improved dramatically. We no longer feel the need for a fire in the living room in the evening, and we've dialled back the central heating in the evening. The veggie plot has been dug over a couple of times to remove as many of the weeds as possible - and the damn things keep growing back. Never mind! We've seeded some onions, brussel sprouts and cauliflowers. Our next door neighbours have given us some garlic. So we have the beginnings of our veggie garden.

On the weekend, I dug over the area by the shed and found some potatoes growing, so I've re-planted and spaced them out a little, whilst mixing in some compost for good measure. I hope they continue to germinate. I also dug over the area that was becoming infested with ground elder, which now has strawberries growing in it. I'm told strawberries are very good at fighting off ground elder. Time will tell :)

We've also discovered that concrete path round the house was being rather successfully encroached upon by the grass either side. So we've got a much clearer path now, free of weeds and grass. I also dug up the area that was being used as a fire pit - conveniently placed in the middle of the lawn! Having spent a not inconsiderable amount of time digging the ground over, and removing quite a lot of broken tiles and other rubbish, we've now got a big hole. We're doing a bit of an experiment. We were going to turf the patch, but the local B&Q had run out, despite them having an entire trolley the day before. So we've used the turf from the path on a small patch of lawn that only had moss growing in it, and we're going to sow grass seed in the larger patch to see which one works better. Time will tell.

My wife had some hanging baskets left over from one of her business ventures, so we've put them up at the front of the house. We've just got to remember to water the darn things! The house faces south, so they will get sun all day every day. With the recent good weather, I wonder how long it will be before we forget to water the pansies and they die :(

Finally, I've managed to install one of the water butts on the side of the house, so we can water the front garden without drawing on mains water. This is hooked up to the drain pipe on the side of the house, though I'm going to have to remove the extensive plants from the guttering before that will be effective!

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!

Kitchens....

So we had a very nice consultant over from Wickes yesterday to measure up the kitchen. My boss has given me a half day tomorrow so we can go to the store and look over the designs and order it. We really need to order tomorrow as their sale ends then!


We also had a chap over to look at moving the cooker. He's a gas man, and isn't qualified to do the electrics on the cooker. *sigh* The cooker will need to be moved before we can install the kitchen, but we've got a three to four week lead time on the kitchen units, which gives us more than enough time to rip out the old kitchen and move the cooker. Can't believe I'm going to say this - but yay for lead times.


We've also had a bit of a think about the kitchen. Currently the bathroom is off the kitchen, and we want to move it upstairs. There is a toilet in the bathroom at the moment. So here's a thought:

We can create a much bigger kitchen by knocking through to the bathroom as it stands. But what do we do with the toilet?
We don't want to get rid of the toilet - we're about to start a family and we're not too keen on having to take a toddler upstairs just to go to the loo.

So we have a choice - do we leave the toilet where it is? This might have building regulation implications if we get rid of the wall round what is currently the bathroom.

Or - can we move the toilet into the cupboard under the stairs. I'm not sure about this one - there are shall we say - privacy implications!

This demonstrates one of the problems we're facing at the moment. Can we find a copy of the current building regs online? Can we 'eck! So if anyone knows where we can find building regs online - particularly ones relating to this kind of problem - please leave a comment.

Update: sent the money and all the paperwork to the solicitor. Wow that's a scary amount of money. Lets hope the solicitor gave me the right details for their account!