Our bathroom renovation

I’ve been remiss as a blogger, and I apologise. My own ‘About Me’ page promises to chart our journey as we turn a 1970s box into a family home and yet we have a big project on the go which I haven’t told you anything about. And when I’ve finally got round to writing a post about starting to update our family bathroom, I find that I don’t even have a before shot of the space. As someone who has written makeover features for magazines for over ten years, this is unforgivable offence. No before shot? Seriously?! But no, every photograph or video I can find of this haven of avocado fittings, green carpet and swirly green wall tiles also appears to include at least one naked child.

Anyway, after a day out with the twins a couple of weeks ago I came home to discover that Ben had got all gung ho with a sledgehammer, as you can see in the photo below. We’ve recently had our hot water cylinder removed from an airing cupboard in the bathroom and relocated in the loft, with the aim to knock out the airing cupboard to increase the floor space in the compact family bathroom, and while investigating what the walls were actually made from he got a bit carried away as you can see.

So the airing cupboard was knocked out, and we decided that actually it seemed to make sense to move the doorway into the bathroom to where the door to one side of the room instead of in the middle of the wall. In the photograph below you can see what it looked like when our bathroom had no wall.

Luckily the door frame remained intact so it could be moved over to one side, and a new stud wall built so privacy was restored!

My handy father-in-law has helped with all this work (cheers Graham), and he also pulled off most of the old tiles, just leaving some around the bath so the walls are still protected when the twins create a tidal wave of bath water every evening.

I’m in the middle of a mega work project and my brain space (and free time) is under severe pressure at the moment, so choosing a new bathroom suite has been, by necessity, a very quick decision. It’s white, and the dimensions are right, and that’s really all I have the energy to care about right now!  We ordered it online and it’s already arrived and is being stored in the garage. The tiles were also bought in a blink of an eye when we visited a tile showroom, found that the ones we liked the look of were priced up wrongly (too cheap) and would therefore legally have to be sold to us at the cheaper price. We didn’t hesitate and bought 15 square metres on the spot. There really is no messing around on this project. My dad is booked for a couple of days the week after next to help fit the suite.

I’m not sure when we’ll have a finished bathroom, but it’s perfectly serviceable at the moment so I’m not too worried. As soon as there’s anything else to report, I’ll let you know.