DIY Project Diary – week 3

The builders left at last – after 3 weeks of work. It took us a couple of weeks to install the office units, the secondary lighting system and some wardrobes from Schreiber. People complain about IKEA flat packs, but they should try Schreiber, the German manufacturer! It took us 3 days to put together a double -wardrobe. It was soooo complicated – unnecessarily so. Comparatively, IKEA units are designed for idiots to put together..

At last we have bookshelves and cupboards to put things. Also, we now have an office, where we can work as well as operate our home renovation project.

After the builders left we decided to do most of the work ourselves for STAGE 2: the top floor. First we needed to revamp the bathroom. It needed to be spatially re-arranged. The loo was right next to the door. There was no storage. There was no mirror. There was no power shower. But there was carpet on the floor. I don’t get this English way of carpeting bathrooms and toilets. It’s just so unhygienic. The very next day we moved in, I removed the carpet – the plywood underneath actually looked better and was certainly more hygienic. So I redesigned the whole bathroom.

This was what I came up with:

• swap the loo with the sink
• make the sink and loo appear floating
• lower the height of the boxed in services
• create some recesses within the services box
• install a new power shower
• maximise the space with a sliding door
• have mirror on the sliding door to make the room look double
• tile the whole room with the same sandstone-looking ceramic tiles
• create storage and mood-lighting above the service area

We decided to get a plumber to install the power shower and re-arrange the loo and sink. Also, we knew a good tiler who has worked for us before so we though that he should do the tiling, as the final appearance is so important. We were going to do all the joinery (or woodwork) including the boxing in the power shower, creating a new service box, cabinets, cantilevering the loo and a shelf for the “floating” sink.

Of course getting a plumber wasn’t easy. We finally found one locally – recommended on an internet site. We arranged that he would come on Monday morning at 8am… he still hasn’t turned up ( a month later). So we called our previous builders, who in the meantime had parted company, and asked the plumber whether he would do the job. He said he would – the work would take him 3 days. But he could only fit it in the following week. OK. We agreed. We also agreed on an hourly-based charge as the work seemed straightforward. In the meantime the new bath, sink, loo and taps have arrived… the house became a warehouse again.

Also, we bought some reclaimed Mahuhu parquet floor for the sitting room back in January – they also turned up during this week in messy & smelly bags. They now line the hallway.

The plumber did turn up on time – well, on the first day anyway. The next day he phoned that he had to do some “emergency work” elsewhere. The following day he arrived after lunch… then it was the weekend. Thankfully he’d plumbed in the loo temporarily – but we had no bath nor sink to wash in. On the following Monday/Tuesday he had to work on another project. He came on the Wednesday/Thursday to plumb in the new bath and to install the power shower. But the power-shower valve was faulty and we had to take it back to the other side of London, where we were told that there was nothing wrong with it – the plumber had tried to install it the wrong way around. Of course his charge-clock was ticking…

 He came back the following week to finish off the radiator and other details and to collect his payment. I refused to pay him the whole amount – it was an absurd amount of money charged for labour. I just cannot believe that a plumber can charge up to ten times as much as teacher or other professionals. This is a rip-off and just basically wrong.

Anyway, we now believe that we should have done the job ourselves. We would have saved a grand as well as the bathroom would have been finished by now…

Of course the bathroom is still not ready – although everything is plumbed in, we are still waiting for the tiler who keeps postponing the starting date. He’s “definitely” coming next week. Until then we’ll have to finish the upper cabinets and make the sliding door. I decided to put decking on the cabinets – made of iroko wood. I got them cut into 65mm wide 7mm thick stripes and will glue them onto the doors. My partner wants them to be screwed or at lest nailed – but I want a seamless finish. No screws. No nails. No handles either (they will have a push-spring mechanism to open). The cabinets are made of plywood and MDF – but only the doors will be visible and these will be covered by these strips of hardwood. The shelf underneath already has three long pieces of decking – these can be removed to access the loo cistern and the pipes.

In the meantime I’m designing our new bedroom…