The bathroom renovation Aug/2011 Sandy7m 7of

I am glad I went for a cabinet style shower. Even if it did take nearly three weeks to get the worst of the work done to the bathroom (and a further week and a half to finish), it would have taken a lot longer to put in a conventional tiled shower. In all it took three days to get the bath out and the shower in, the toilet took a day. The vanity unit was low priority so although it took maybe three days to do, that was spanned out over the three week period. To "fine tune" the shower and toilet took another four or five days. The joinery to hide the pipes and wires took a couple of days. Tiling the walls was a four day marathon with maybe another day or two doing all the fiddly bits for that. The tiling on the floor took maybe a day or two to totally finish. Assembling and fastening the cabinet units must have taken a good few days as I had a lot of jiggery-pockery to do to get them in. The radiator and boxing in the pipes for that took a day and a bit when totalled up. The electrics took a couple of days cos I ran all the wiring from the consumer unit myself. The plastering and painting of the roof took a good three days which was a bit longer than it should have taken but I had a few setbacks. The window was done "picture frame" style rather than tiled. That maybe seems a bad short cut (instead of tiling) but it is better done that way for numerous reasons. More modern look as well.

One of the reason the bathroom took so long to do was that I had to do this project piece-meal - the family still needed a bathroom. If I could, I would have moved them out to a hotel for a week or two. The other reason for doing it the way I did was to maximise the space I had in the bathroom. A proper bathroom installer would not have gone the way I would - he would have kept it simpler to speed up the work - and in doing so would probably have used up a bit more space than I did. That was one more contributing reason why I took longer to do the project.

To get the shower totally finished I had to get an electrician to get the wires properly connected to the consumer box. It also required a Residual Current Circuit Breaker to be installed at the electrical supply. The electrician did that at the same time. Took him two hours to do that. I had already done all the wiring and I made it easy to check what I had done as the wiring went to a junction box in the dining room before it went into the bathroom. I am sure he was impressed :-) Prior to that I had jumped the power from a normal wall socket to that junction box - not pretty but a good temporary measure until I could get the electrician. Until the electrician wired up the power supply we could not use the sauna either - needs 20 amps and sockets are only safe for 13.

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