As we mentioned yesterday, this was the room that underwent the biggest change.
The most obvious issue was the constant leak from a mysterious pipe hanging down from inside the ceiling. There is a fine line between ‘bad leak’ and ‘interesting water feature’, and this leak came as close as possible to the line without actually crossing it. The real problem with this bathroom was it’s peculiar design. Firstly, the room was tiny – about 1.8 x 1.8 metres, or about the length of 3.9 cats. Secondly, on the north and south side were doors to bedrooms two and three. The doors both swung open inwards, and when they were open at the same time (admittedly, this was rarely the case) they almost collided into each other. The gap between the two edges was about a hand’s width, and in this tiny gap was the shower head. Clearly there was no room for a shower screen, and so this was a wet room (in more ways that one if you count the constant leak).
We really wanted to be able to put in a glass screen for the shower, but as the works progressed we realised that the design wouldn’t physically work for one (unless you wanted bloodied elbows after smashing though the glass trying to wash yourself). And so this bathroom remains a wet room. There were also numerous mistakes in the finishing, with the addition of scratches in our new mirror and silicone stains over many of the tiles.
A lot of the minor hole filling, replacement of screws, touching up of paint, proper attachment of shower heads etc. can be (and has been) done by us, but we’re not confident in grinding into the tiles and tearing out all the plumbing and electrical wiring. Especially not when we’ve already paid someone else to do it.
The bathroom itself. This photo was taken from the doorway of bedroom two. The door at the back leads to bedroom three.
Higher view from inside. You can see the leaky pipe and the paint that it removed.
The outside of the bathroom from inside bedroom two.
Same view as the last photo. Smashing the walls allows the bathroom to be extended.
Bricking the walls. The old door holes are covered over.
Fully bricked, with the new door frame setting in place.
The wall is cemented over.
The start of the new floor
Black tiles have been added, and so have the new doors.
Here is the bathroom as it currently exists.
Here’s another view. How we SHOULD have designed this bathroom was to put the toilet on the right hand wall facing the sink, and put a glass screen along the length of the back wall for the shower with the towel rail attached to the glass. We will contemplate the logistics of this in the future. It is tough having two doors leading in.
And so that’s it for our house renovations. All in all we’re very happy with how things turned out, and the only issues now are with the bathroom finishing. It’s still surprising for us to see the before and after photos, and really, the builders did an amazingly large job in a very short time. If we’d tried to do all of this ourselves we’d probably be here for another two years.
These last few renovation posts have been set to go out automatically, one per day. By the time you read this we’ll both be either somewhere in Malaysian Borneo, or somewhere in Kalimantan. So expect some stories from those adventures soon!