Beautiful tiles going up...

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All Boxed Up

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18 Simple Steps to Lay a Floor

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Floored by the floor

Onto the floor now.  I look at the drain, can't see how the cover fits on water tight (one piece was oval one was square) and call the company.  They say it can only be used with their shower trays, no way I can use it now, any solution requires digging it all back up again.

Cue more frustration.

I order a new drain, and dig it all up.  It wasn't too bad, as I could leave the bulk of my cement in there, and just get enough pipe exposed to fit the new drain.  A bit of pipework and solvent cement, the new drain and location look like this:

 This should fit nicely butted up to the left hand side of the room, with the right hand side having a 15cm-ish box concealing the shower unit, butted right up to the edge of the drain.

You can see another waterproof socket there - that's for the shower unit power.

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Ceiling number 1

The first ceiling, is a fake ceiling to cover the pipes and electrics, and give support to suspend the second ceiling.  Built in the same way as the previous one, wooden batons round the circumference of the room, with three cross-batons resting on them.

The ceiling is MDF, sprayed with an enamel gloss white paint. About a thousand layers, and it's still not perfect.

I found some simple right angle brackets to use to suspend the second ceiling, and fitting these to the cross batons with bolts, and big nuts and washers on the other side.

Overhead piping just came through at a right angle with a push-fit elbow, and mains cables (lighting circuit) with a bit of ducting.

Trickiest bit was getting it in place. A single piece of MDF was pretty big, and we had to get everything to line up; the pipe, the cable, the speaker cable, and the 6 bolt holes.  Was very tricky, but we got there after a few attempts.

Looks like this now:

Not a bad job, if I do say so myself. A few gaps here and there, but coving will cover those.  And importantly, the brackets are on solid, with all the weight being distributed across big washers, and the lateral beams.

That's also a waterproof plug socket that I will plug the lights into.  It's fed by the wall switch panel.  It's rated IP65, crucially, when in use. I found some that were only rated when not being used, they're for sale now if you want one.

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Finally....Build it back up

We were sick and tired by this point. Everything messy and a building site everywhere.  So we were happy to start building the room back up.  We're done with demolition, at last.

So the aquaboards go up.  These are tile backer boards, or plaster boards, specifically for wet rooms.  They're pretty solid cement boards with a think vinyl covering.  About a cm thick.

"Dot n Dabbed" with waterproof cement, and screwed them all in with 70mm screws into the brickwork.

Starting to look a bit better!

You can see all the electrics poking out the wall, a temporary light switch, and the holes I've cut for the hand shower to roll in and out of.  There are also water in pipes coming through, the overhead shower pipe is hidden and pokes out at the top and bottom of the wall, the there's a hole in the top of the shelf bit.
 Aquaboards all up (overhead pipe sticking out the window):

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Floors

Didn't plan to change the floor, but there were no floor tiles where the old wooden box was, so didn't have much choice.

So the floor comes up, and the old stinky drain:

I took out a round drain, dug all around the flaky concrete, exposed the waste pipe and stuck an adapter on there. It then fit nicely into my drain housing.

Poured a load of concrete around it, and bob's your uncle.

And yep, I found water pipes buried in the ground concrete. Still on the water mains, pinched shut, and buried.  The bastards. I won't vent my rage here, if you know me, you've heard it already.

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Making a mess to make it tidy

This post will be all about hiding wires and pipes in the walls.  It's a fascinating topic, I know.

Short story - I bought a pretty powerful electric wall-chaser ("Chasing" is hiding stuff in walls) for 90 quid.  It would have cost 120 quid to hire a professional one with a vacuum, and the lady really recommended the vacuum.  Nah, buy a cheaper one, skip the vacuum.  It worked, but you wouldn't believe the mess it INSTANTLY makes.  Really noise, pretty hard to hold against the wall and move upwards, and instantly covers everything in sight with a huge dust cloud. Great fun.

And I ended up with big grooves in my walls to hide:

• The pipes for the concealed hand-shower at the end of the room
• The pipes for the overhead shower up the side of the room, next to the water source pipes
• The cables from the light switch area up to the ceiling, to conceal light cables, audio cables, and any other electrics.

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The felling of the tiles

Kayliegh happened to have a work trip for a week in the US, so I took the opportunity to kick off the project.  The intention was to get all the tiles down while she was gone, and present her with a clean blank canvas on her return.

This didn't happen.

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I haven't updated the blog for a long time, as you can see. Fair to say I can't be arsed at the moment, but I'll get back to it.

In the meantime, I'll upload photos I'm taking of the project as I go (I only ever meant to share the photos in the first place), with minimal waffling...

So, tiles coming down:

As you can see, the plaster was falling apart as well, so we decided to go back to bare brick. Fantastic.

Spot the old copper pipe buried in the right wall?  Yeah that was fun.  It was shielding two mains cables, one live, one dead, that ran from the ceiling down into a wooden junction plate, that was all buried in the second layer of wall plaster.  After a bit of chopping, cursing, testing, and really fiddly electric work (because I chopped it right at the ceiling, dumbass) turns out it's responsible for the lighting circuit in a completely different room. I'll say that again. It's the connecting cable, from the light switch, to the light, in a completely different room.  You can imagine the words I used.












Take the ceiling down:

Away with the old ceiling, to make way for a shiny new one:

Was surprisingly difficult to get down.  Those side batons were nailed into the wall with 9 inch nails, but the air hammer and a new circular saw made pretty short work of it.  Cables left dangling were just from the light switch to the now-exposed ceiling rose.

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