House renovations

Upstairs bathroom

I love making unloved houses good again. My current house is the fourth one I am doing up by myself. I don’t do everything literally myself, only the lighter work, but I redesign it, usually sympathetically, especially if the house is old. I also recycle and use old pieces whenever possible and work on my own in the garden. I have decided not to go for extensive changes here because I would need planning permission to add or change windows or walls, which is a long process and might be expensive. The house was the old German farmhouse in its previous life and still has far too small windows, so it is fairly dark inside. The previous owner added four velux windows in the roof. Three in the room which was split into two bedrooms and one where the bathroom was meant to be. They didn’t start the bathroom job, except for the sewer pipe connection. This small room was full of old TV aerials, building rubble, wooden planks and goodness knows what else. The previous owners left behind things which they didn’t use and which were worthless anyway. Old, broken electrical appliances, well worn giant skating shoes, broken fishing rods and tangled fishing lines, old garden tools (those I love), old bricks and pavement stones, torn up canvasses and river sand. Five broken bicycles, ancient and heavy wooden wheelbarrow, old zinc bath (I love this one too), big pile of coal I gave away, piles of partially rotten and half eaten by wood borer chopped up wood, unending electrical and telephone wires snaking around the whole house to nowhere, foot balls without air, rat poison which almost killed my dogs etc. etc.

Here is my bathroom created from nothing really. This photo is already a huge improvement to what was here originally. I removed all the rubbish and took it to recycle centre in my trusty little trailer, where I had to sort it out into various containers. The photo was taken after the builder started the work on the floor and water piping, but the sloping ceiling is as it was left originally, just tidied up. There were bats or mice in this mineral wool; we’ve found their droppings and the whole area smelled of animals.

I was talked into dry wall construction, which I don’t like and avoid if possible, but the wall is single brick (the attic was originally used as storage, so the original builders saved money on building thin walls upstairs), so it made sense to insulate it well. I wanted it to look a bit special without spending a fortune so bought a small bath tub, but installed a standing faucet for it. The shower is open and has sheet of glass on one side only. Settled on the normal, old fashioned central heating unit. I find that those bathroom towel drying ones get air at the top part too often and it’s a pain to let the air out again, and again.

I like the end result a lot. I used the old sewing machine table I was given by friends to place the sink on and just scraped and painted it here and there. I bought two mirrors in a second hand shop for 5 Euro and painted the frame of the bigger one. It was ugly, almost orange pine before. The area behind the shower houses my tumble drier. I didn’t want to delegate it to one of outbuildings and being upstairs it is close to bedrooms, so dry washing is folded and put in cupboards which are close to the bathroom. The toilet bowl was meant to stand alongside the back wall, but by the time the builder build the thick wall it was too close to the wall and too late to change the sewer connection, so we fitted the toilet bowl under the angle and it actually looks better than planned originally. The beam in the middle of the floor holds the ceiling of the ground floor and I didn’t want to touch it. It would probably open Pandora’s Box of additional repairs and renovations. To have enough of the underfloor space for the bathtub’s piping we split the floor into two different levels and it looks as if it was meant to be. White walls make the room bigger and lighter. I like darker colours on walls, but they need big windows to let lots of light. All in all not too bad and not too expensive.