How to Renovate a Bathroom and Nearly Lose Your Dad in the Process
I thought I'd just talk you through the bathroom this time, tiles, timelines, the lot etccccc.
The green tiles were the first thing to go, and they were genuinely lovely, that soft sage colour you only really find in houses nobody's touched since the seventies. Sadly, and I'll put this as politely as I can, years of piss had made its way through the grout and down into the subfloor underneath, so there was never really a world where we kept them. Still a shame though. They'd clearly been somebody's pride and joy once.
Day one also nearly took my dad out entirely. He put a foot in the bath to help us start stripping things back and very nearly went straight through it, which in hindsight told us everything we needed to know about what was going on underneath. He survived. The bath didn't.
We ended up gutting the whole room back to brick. While we were in there we moved the soil stack outside too, and discovered it was half cast iron, half asbestos, which is not something you expect to find out about your own bathroom on a random Tuesday.
Somewhere in amongst all this, Astro got under the bath. There'd been a leak at some point before we moved in, and it turned out the ceiling below, into the kitchen, had gone properly weak because of it, soft enough that his paw went straight through. For weeks after that we'd be stood in the kitchen, doing something completely normal like making dinner, and look up to see his little face wedged into this hole in the ceiling, peering down at us like he'd just discovered a whole new room. Deeply unbothered by the structural implications. We were less relaxed about it.
On the plus side, we finally got a freestanding shower in and, just as importantly, kept the bath. I will go to my grave saying baths are the better way to wash. Anyone who disagrees has clearly never properly soaked the day off in one.
The new tiles were meant to be a soft cream terrazzo for the walls. What turned up was grey. Properly, flatly grey, and if you know me at all you'll know grey makes me want to put pins in my eyes. There was a fair bit of standing around staring at the wrong colour tile before we just decided to go with it, pairing them with a faux wood tile from B&Q for the floor, which actually ended up looking better than what we'd originally planned. Funny how that works out sometimes.
This was Mike's first go at tiling, and he smashed it, no exaggeration. I'd love to say I helped more than I did, but mostly I made coffee and handed him the spirit level like that counted for something.
For the record, I did want a coloured suite. Something with a bit of personality. My dad flatly refused to help unless we went white, no negotiation at all. I think there's a story there from his own childhood none of us are getting the full version of, something involving a bathroom suite so offensive to him that decades later he still won't go near colour in one. We went white in the end. He helped. Everyone got roughly what they needed, even if what I wanted was slightly more colourful than what I actually got.
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