Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Tuesday: Darn, Day 16 of bathroom renos didn’t start until a day later than expected. Why? The painter ran over on his previous job and threw the schedule out by another day. Monday was a public holiday here and with another extra day required early last week for the extra coat of waterproofing we wanted, we’re now past the 3-week time frame, and it will likely be 4+ weeks. Painting will take at least a day, possibly 2. Then the shower screen and the sliding doors have to get installed (none are here as yet—doors may not come until next week), and I think the painter has to come back to paint the doors too. And the carpet tradie has to refit the bedroom carpet that was pulled up to give clear access to the en suite bathroom. It’s so close…. And we’re getting sick of the broken sleep we get from the bed in the spare room—we’d just like to get our bedroom back at this point.

Wednesday: Update: Painter due here ‘before lunch’ today. Assuming that all goes well, shower screen due Friday. Doors that were due to come early next week now due to arrive tomorrow.

Wednesday further update: Painter now here; doors arriving today. And I found out from the project manager that 3 weeks = 21 work days, not calendar days, so we’re into Day 16 of the 21 working days.

End of day: The painter did a lot of prep work today—patching and priming surfaces ready for the full day tomorrow, which he expects it will take to complete the painting. But the big surprise when I popped my head in late this afternoon was the sliding doors—I had assumed they’d be the boring flat doors I remembered from my childhood, but no…. the project manager had ordered doors panelled and coloured the SAME as the other internal doors in the house! That was a lovely surprise.

The skip bin people were here bright and early to take the very full (and heavy) skip. The electrician arrived just before 8:30 to do the final electrical work (power outlets, light switches, exhaust fans) and was done by about 10am. No more tradies until Tuesday (Monday is a public holiday here) when the painter arrives. The OM covered over the new shower fittings in prep for the painter.

Full skip ready to be taken away this morning. Bye-bye bathroom!

New exhaust fan above shower (there’s a similar one in the toilet). Both the PM and the electrician say these are incredibly efficient, far more so than the previous ones we had.

Plastic protective covering over the new shower fittings in readiness for the painter on Tuesday.

TWO double power outlets! We only had one before, on that far right wall. And a new hand-towel rail.

Boring but functional—light and fan switches; the 3rd switch in the toilet is for the smart toilet.

Posting these pics a little late as the plumber didn’t get here until late afternoon. Progress today installing the pelmets for the sliding doors and fitting and testing all the plumbing fixtures, including the toilet. 

The fittings are starting to go in—there’ll be more this afternoon, so I’ll add more photos at the end of the day.

Later…

Double shelves in the shower because we BOTH have shampoos etc. These were going to be side by side, but the position of the pipework behind the walls and the narrow gap for the shower hose meant that wasn’t a good option in reality (it looked good on paper, but sometimes you have to make compromises along the way, such as the position of the mixer tap for the shower—that was meant to be much closer to the window, but the hot water pipes for the whole house are behind the first set of tiles on that wall and the pipework for the shower and its tap cross those pipes so we couldn’t put the tap there without ripping out the whole wall (a load-bearing wall) and starting again—not going to happen!). Also a grab rail for holding onto when you clean your feet and between your toes.

Smart toilet facing the wrong way, but ready to be installed when the plumber comes tomorrow. Toilet roll holder still to be added, but grab rail already in place—remember, we want to ‘age in place’ in this house, so putting these things in now means we don’t have to retrofit if one of us has a temporary or long-term disability, or just needs a bit of support getting onto or off the toilet.

Double towel rails on the wall opposite the walk-in shower (DH is ~1.9 m tall, so the top one is for him!). If we need more towel rails, they can go on the back of the sliding doors (I’ve already checked this with the PM). Oh, and the vanity top, doors and handles have been added.

Today was the final tiling and all the wall and floor grouting. It’s now all drying in prep for tomorrow when some of the fittings and plumbing will start to get installed. It’s starting to look more and more like a bathroom!
Only the silicon beading to be done in the corners of the shower and where the wall tiles meet the floor.

Tiled floor has been washed and is now drying—the tiler did a great job matching the tiles in the channel drain with those on the floor. I watched him set aside those pieces several days ago when he was making his cuts for the floor tiles—that prep certainly paid off.

In this last photo, the grouted area is on the left showing how clean a finish grouting makes to the tiles; the ungrouted floor tiles are on the right. And my purple Crocs are making an unexpected appearance 🙂

The tiler and project manager (PM) here bright and early this morning. By lunchtime, the tiler had finished almost all the wall tiling, the PM made the surround for the in-wall toilet cistern, which the tiler mostly tiled. More time to cure, so they’d both left by lunchtime. The tiler will finish the last bits of tiling tomorrow and then do the grouting.

Later this week will see the return of the plumber and electrician, plus the painter, and most of the fittings will be installed. Next Monday is a public holiday, so the shower screen may not come until next Tuesday, but we should hopefully have a functioning bathroom sometime next week, a couple of days over the expected time. The doors won’t be installed until 14 March (I think), then I think the painter comes back to do those. And yes that now very yellow caramel paint will be replaced with a much lighter beach sand colour.

Almost 2 weeks into the 3-week reno (though it maybe a couple more days than that until it’s all finished). And by the middle of Day 10, we’re at the stage where all the floors have been tiled (not yet grouted) and the walls are partly tiled. I’ll add more photos at the end of the day.

Photos after the tiler finished for the day (I like how he tiled the floor and wall area that will be hidden by the vanity unit—it means that if we ever decide to change out the vanity, we won’t need to redo the tiling):

We have progress! The floor tiling has begun and is expected to be finished in a few hours. We’re getting floorboard-look tiles for the floor, in a soft caramel colour. Why? Because the wooden floors in our house are a honey-coloured blackbutt (Australian native timber) and the carpet in the adjoining bedroom is a caramel colour as are the walls etc. and I didn’t want to depart too far from what we already had.

I took a couple of photos when the tiler went to lunch. Possibly more to come later today. And yes, the shower will have a channel drain.

By 2pm, he’d finished the main bathroom floor except for a tiny bit in a corner and the toilet. The bathroom floor looks like that little Aussie bleeder, Norman Gunston (only Australians of a certain age will get that!)

Not a lot to report. The 3 coats of waterproofing need a day to dry between each coat, so the first few days this week is just watching paint dry—literally!

Both the tiler and the project manager have been here for short stints on both days—the tiler to do the waterproofing and prep work for tiling (which starts tomorrow, Day 9!) and the PM to do small things, like patch holes in walls then sand down in preparation for the tiling and painting, vacuum the concrete floors with an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner, replace skirtings on the bedroom side of the en suite that were taken off to allow the doorway to be widened etc.

And the tiler has put up his plan for the floorboard-style tiles he’ll be laying on the floor.

Day 6 of bathroom renos. Very quiet today. The only activity was the tiler doing the first waterproofing coat, and the project manager installing the architraves for the 2 widened doorways. Both were finished and gone before 11am.

Tomorrow will be another coat of waterproofing around 8am, with possibly the final (3rd) coat tomorrow afternoon if the weather remains hot and dry as expected. The Australian Standard for waterproofing is one coat up to 1.8 m high in the shower, but this company does 2 coats as standard and up to tile height (2 m in our case). Because I’ve had 3 bathrooms retiled in the past 16 years because of waterproofing issues, I insisted on 3 coats—I DO NOT want to have to be in a situation where this has to be redone.

Also, sometime in the past few work days, the cistern got installed inside the frame that will conceal it.