Grand Progress

Family took at 10 day "holiday" down at the house over the last 2 weekends, while I came back to work during the week in between. Mum installed these "steps" so we don't have to walk on the grass to get to the carport,(or step over the herb garden, though herb garden might be an optimistic name for it, it's currently full of daffodils and weeds).

I turned up Friday after work, in a car loaded down with a shower I bought on Trademe.co.nz, a new shower liner, shower mixer, and waste outlet. When I opened the door to the bathroom, this is what I found:

Bath gone, walling removed, chip board floor pulled up to reveal floorboards underneath. All in a days work! They started pulling the bathroom to bits Friday morning, and when I got there late afternoon it had reached this stage. The day before they had taken the trailer to pick up 2 sheets of aqualine gib for behind the shower, and 1 sheet of marine grade strandboard for the replacement floor underneath.

Although these wooden floorboards are under the ratty old chip board, they are not sealed and seem a bit "gappy", if you know what I mean. Not being part of the original house, I don't feel too precious about them, but I'm glad they are there. I'll just leave them safely tucked away under the other flooring, in case I win lotto, or in case a future owner of the house wins lotto. :-) I can't get under the back part of the house to insulate. In fact, I can only get under a small part of it to do any plumbing. Lucky then, that that's daylight you can see through the bottom of that wall, because it's where the floor level drops in the house. The shower plumbing is easily accessible! Same for the hot water cylinder next to it. What's not good, is that there was no shut off tap for the hot water cylinder. Even with the water off at the tank and pump switched off, gravity meant that once the hot water pipe to shower was unscrewed, the whole cylinder drained out through it. Lucky my uncle has brains. We went without hot water overnight, but ended up having to fill the HWC so we could have any water at all. Next day we had to drain it again to finish the plumbing. A great variety of sizes of pipes and fittings meant we didn't have the right sizes on hand, and had to wait for the local Placemakers to open the next day. In the meantime, uncle found a valve-type thing in the shed that was the right size, and fitted it so that we could stop the hot water in future. Most unfortunately, it has a very slow leak, so it will have to be replaced, and the cylinder drained again! Getting on to that as soon as possible. Anyway...

The old bath.

Gib up, tray getting all level and stuff.

Waiting for silicone to dry, about to maneuver shower liner into place.

Liner propped up while glue drys.

How the bathroom looks now.

Still to do: Doors to assemble and be put in, silicone sealing, waste pipe to attach.
The new shower waste I bought didn't fit under the floorboards, as it had a ...bottle trap? instead of a ....U bend? Something like that. We installed the old one, but then the U bend was too close and hit the floorboards underneath. grrrr. So, need a longer pipe to it. Anyway, by the end of next weekend, I'm hoping I'll have a working shower! Fingers crossed.

In non-bathroom related news.... this was discovered.

It's not grass between the tank and the shed! It's brick paving!

"Huntly Firebrick" :-)