Bathroom lollapalooza

Let’s just say this:

This year I’ve learned a lesson, a truly valuable and incalculable account of what not to do when you hire help to do building work in the house:

Rule number 1:

Never pay your builders before finishing the job.

Rule number 2:

Be around every day or they’ll go for the shoddy shortcuts at the minimum opportunity. ( seriously I went full on mama Morton with them )

But let’s start from the very beginning.

Just as a reminder to you all, I’m crazy. Insanely crazy some might say, for inviting 21 people to our house for Xmas day dinner. And I was terribly excited. A chance to use all the silver, nice china and glassware ?

This had some implications, we no longer could postpone finishing the dining room and we needed a bathroom ASAP.

The dining room was a relatively easy job as I just had to build some storage under the window, retouch the floor and stage all the room.

The storage was built using some victorian panelled doors that I got skip diving in the neighbourhood. Too far gone for their original use they proof to be great material to make a window-bench-storage-portal-to-narnia.

We plan on putting a mattress on top of it, creating not only a comfy window seat full of pillows but an extra bed for emergengy guests. Or the real use of it, a fainting couch to embroider my life away in silent corseted desperation.

The star of the room is now the light fixture I made by usen a broken umbrella and my hubbies grandmas music sheets.

I’m very glad that here you can truly appreciate one of the Ekena millwork gorgeous ceiling roses that we have installed everywhere superb quality and the design echoes the details from the fireplace beautifully.

The bathroom was another story. A Stephen king fantasy. It had to be demolished and completely rebuilt to meet my expectations.

And my expectations were the bathroom in room 237 from the overlook hotel.

I invited the builders over to give us a quote, and I gladly accepted it as it was quite reasonable and they seemed fairly professional.

The premise was simple. Art Deco realness with all the fixtures and trimmings.

The builders promised that the bathroom could be done in 5 days as this was in their words an ” easy job”

I knew this was bullshit as my ganfather was a plasterer and ruler but I rolled with the flow, took my seat back and relaxed to see what was going to happen.

The work started well with a fairly quick demolishing action and within two days the horrible early 90s suite was gone.

After the demolition was due the Two builders started tiling the wall. We were installing subway tile and thank god I was home cos they were not staggering it.

Needless to say that I briefed them in detail with what I wanted originally,but they chose to do it the easy way , so they didn’t have to cut any tiles. My eyes were bleeding with this torment so instead of doing this:

I asked them very politely to start over and this was the result.

Then they didn’t come for a couple of days and I was getting desperate. It was already a week and we still had no bathroom.

Just for your consideration we had been showering with hot water buckets from the kitchen in the downstairs shower ( which doesn’t work ) all full victorian style.(it didn’t look anything like this )

And let me tell you, I love the past, but give me a bathroom !

So the tenth day mounts up and they decided to come home again. And complete the floor slightly.

I originally asked them to lift all the floor and level it, fix it and lay the new tile. But contrary to my request they decided to tile over the old tile glueing my gorgeous mosaic tile with 99p sealant.

I had to ask them very simple tweaks that should have been considered by them and their professional experience.

Like lowering the bath( they installed it at 1.20 height from the floor)

And centering the toilet with the pattern design in the floor.( they wanted to leave it where it was )

But the list of crimes against style that they committed didn’t end there. I asked them to put all the pipework under the floor and I ended with this in between the two vanities.

A jungle of pipes that would have done the delights of Lex Barker.

Me being me I had to build something to hide it that would be somewhat stylish and vintage looking .

So this job stretched from the end of October-November- and mid December and they left the job without finishing . As you can imagine after abandoning the job and almost paying £3000 I wasn’t impressed at all. We were left to finish all of this things by ourselves including the plastering.

For the floor, I had to chisel the extra grout they put down ( instead of cutting small tiles ) and cut the tiles myself so the floor looks like this now.

And I made the insert for the soap dish too. I really wanted it in the bathroom and they kept postponing its installation. I salvaged it from my grandmothers bathroom and it has a special meaning for me.

But as I was saying we’ve learned a lesson. I’m not hiring anyone else todo anything in the house but some specialist plumbing and electrics.

The experience has been so atrocious and disruptive in our lives that I don’t want to pass through the experience again.

We got lied to constantly about the reasons why they couldn’t come to complete tasks. They kept asking for money all the time also like if we were a piggy bank.

When they were home, they would work 4 hours and leave to have lunch and not come back…etc completely useless and unreliable.

After all this ordeal I didn’t think that the bathroom was going to bring us any joy. That is till daniel bought me this for Xmas With this Art Deco vitrolite mirrors and some staging the bathroom is now once again one of my favourite rooms in the house. It still needs Plastering but now it doesn’t want to make me sell the house and go elsewhere.

In a more cheerful note we’ve started the job of stripping the staircase in 45 easy steps. Why 45? Because that’s the layers of paint stripper that I’m gonna end using to remove all the gooey pink mess the paint is making. At least it has thrown some light into previous incarnation of the house

Step one consisted on falling off the stairs and blemish my body to resemble a prune. I was so angry that Regan MacNeil would have look like an angel by my side.

I’m fine, but I learned the lesson, wear shoes and start from the bottom of the staircase when you’re stripping paint.

There was white, pink, brown, white, gorgeous 30s green and the natural wood underneath so no that many layers for a house that is now 116 years old.

(Completely unintentional, but doesn’t the newel resemble the evil queens poison apple? Is this an omen ?)And finally the lucky find of the month.

Once upon a time In this dreary corner, there used to be stained glass. Some idiot must have removed it for privacy or who knows what, but with a dash of luck I managed to score this stained glass panels for £20. This is the colour the house used to be, a heinous crime to paint, magnolia was queen here and there was no extra light coming from thetop of the downstairs powder rooms door.

But, let there be light genesis 1:3

This is just first step on the installation. We still need to do some more woodwork and flood the whole thing to make it appear as if it had always been there.