In with the new, out with the old (August 2007)

Now we wouldn't be so arrogant as to suggest that we are good builders, but we feel sufficiently qualified to rubbish the work of the previous builders in this house. At least we are trying to do a good job! The previous guys were clearly trying to take shortcuts wherever they could - converting this property into flats and selling them on as quickly as possible.

So destroying their handiwork has not exactly been heart-wrenching for us, and getting rid of the nasty old bathroom has been a particular highlight. First we had to remove the old pipes, now no longer connected to the mains supply. It was like spaghetti junction in the roof with copper pipes everywhere. For some reason the water pipes went all the way up into the roof, around the back of the bathroom, up a bit further, back down to the boiler in the kitchen, then back up again to feed the bathroom!

So, George cut into the pipes upstairs (still containing water), while I stood underneath in the kitchen/living room holding buckets to catch the flow and stop murky water splashing all over the couch, computer, etc. Removing the drainage pipes was by far the worst task, unsurprisingly. Once cut and drained as much as possible, I had to push these pipes through the external wall while George waited outside to collect them. Each time I banged on the pipe to push it through the brickwork, gobs of foul-smelling sludge splattered all over every surface inside, including me! It was a very large, nasty clean-up job - there was even grey sludge on each slat of the venetian blinds in the bathroom.

Unpleasant, but so satisfying! The next task was to remove the old bathroom suite. The basin and steel bath came out whole without too much trouble, but the toilet had to be smashed up. The stench of stagnant water that had been sitting in the unused toilet bowl for a few days was quite overpowering!

We then moved onto the walls. We discovered a layer of tiles hidden under the tongue and groove panelling! And there were tiles under the laminate floor as well. The bathroom was only built about 15 years ago, so the tiles must have been covered over pretty early on. Even though it seemed ridiculous we could understand why someone would want to cover them up - they were quite ugly!

It became a lot darker in the roof once the pale-coloured walls had gone, even with the light shining through the hole in the brickwork where the toilet drainage pipe had been.
And an angel came down from the heavens... Actually it's George bricking up the toilet hole (it was a sunny day - a rare and wondrous event this summer).
North end of old bathroom with basin and bath removed...

...and now no walls or floor!
It's amazing how much rubbish is produced by demolishing one small bathroom! And this pile was created before the floor and all of the walls were removed. We decided that this lot was too much for us to take to the dump, so we called Ecojunk. You do have to pay them to take the stuff away, but it's cheaper and much easier than a skip, and they aim to recycle 80% of the junk collected.

The next job was to remove the stairs.

Going, going...

...gone!

Some of you may have wondered how we manage to take stuff to the tip when we do not own a car. It's actually very easy - we just hire a car from our local car club, Streetcar. You can book a car by internet or phone and be driving it 10 minutes later. There are 10 different cars within 8 minutes walk of our house, and you can hire one for as little as half an hour. It's so easy and cheap (£4.95 per hour including everything even petrol), and without the car club we would have definitely been forced to buy a car.

The only downside is that the Streetcar vehicles, being Volkswagon Golfs, are not always large enough for our needs. The first time we discovered this was at the builders merchants and faced with collecting 10 sheets of roof insulation whose size we had slightly misjudged. The only option was to tie the insulation sheets to the top of the car, using some rope that we bought from the builders merchants shop. The only way we could tie them down securely was by winding down all 4 car windows and threading the rope around and around. Then we had to climb back into the car through the windows because the car doors were now tied shut by the rope - it was quite embarrassing having to do this in the middle of the builders yard!