Bathrooms

In our first project the main bathroom suite was grey, and very old. The shower was electric and a trickle! The bath seemed to fill up incredibly quickly when having a shower and when we finally had the bathroom redone, it turned out the drain pipe was angled upwards - not good at all.

There were tiles all over the walls, and when we tried to take those down, all the old plaster fell of the walls.  Therefore we had to replaster the whole room. Whilst doing that we decided to take out the old airing cupboard that had housed the hot water tank (which was no longer needed as we'd just put a new combi boiler in the utility room).  We got the plumber to build a shelf in place of the cupboard which was above the stairs and hence had to be quite high due to the angle of the stairs.  

We had a lovely big double ended bath put in, with an extra big bath screen. Separate taps and power shower, and white suite. The tiles were from Wickes £5.99 a pack, but once tiled, together with the quality fittings they didn't look cheap. I think if you combined cheaper tiles but quality fittings, it doesn't look cheap. 

Overall the plumbers did a really good job, however we did have a few problems with the timescales. He said that it would only take 2 weeks, but actually took twice that time. The main plumber we engaged with kept disappearing off the job and left his mate behind. We did some research and the Corgi membership belonged to the mate rather than the man we'd employed!  One evening we rang him to ask when he would actually be finished, and he didn't answer. We went off to have showers at my father in laws house (as we were obviously without a bathroom!) and when we came back we had over 20 miss calls off him, plus a very irate voice mail.  Once he finished the job we have not used him again, and have instead discovered a very good plumber in our friend Annie's dad. He has already installed a new boiler in our current house and just popped in whilst I was writing this to look at a leaking tap - very good service :)