Not Sure How You Guys Do This Every Day

[Marvo]

Today was day 1 of my downstairs bathroom renovation.

• Remove accessories like towel rail, shelves, mirror, panel heater, toilet roll sculpture etc.
• Remove basin, cistern and toilet and bath.
• Drain plumbing, disconnect redundant pipes and cap open pipes, make wiring safe.
  
• Break down brick surround that supported the bath with a jack hammer and break up & remove half a cube of concrete that the bottom of the bath rested on.
• Chisel open external wall and remove several drain pipes.
• Remove wall tiles with jack hammer.
• Remove floor tiles with jack hammer.
• Carefully remove the old adhesive from the walls and floor back to original plaster level using SDS drill in chipper mode.
• Collapse in a heap on the couch.
• Persuade wifey to assist in removing shoes and helping with the hobble to the upstairs shower to get clean.

 

[Marvo]

I like to get it all stripped out on day one.. View attachment 102322 View attachment 102323

Why on earth would they want that bathroom stripping out? If my bathroom looks half as good as that when I've finished I'll be happy.

 

[Marvo]

Day 2.....sigh...

• Trip to the local rubbish dump to get rid of yesterdays rubble.
• Purchase band aids, Tramedol, kneepads and gloves (and a sausage & egg McMuffin) on the way back home.
• Measure, layout and mark all locations for shower drain, shower taps and plumbing, basin taps and plumbing, glass shower screen etc.
  
• Excavate through the screed and into slab to allow 800mm Wirquin shower drain pan to be positioned.
• Chase 50mm shower drain into floor and open wall to allow it to drain into external gulley.
• Carefully plane gradual slope towards drain pan into shower floor using jackhammer.
• Cut back plaster and brickwork around window to prevent finished tile level covering the entire wooden window frame.
• Chase walls for plumbing pipes.
• Smooth all walls and floor with a diamond cup-wheel disk to remove high spots.
• Early finish.

 

[Marvo]

Day 3

• Cemented all the holes in the floor.
• By 9.30am I'd had enough and decided to go fishing instead.

Lessons learned;
Fishing is far more pleasurable than building work.



4th from the left, even after several Tremadol I'm still aching so much I'm struggling to hold up the 88 kilo yellowfin tuna.

 

[GoneGuy]

Keep the posts coming

 

[Spare Tool]

Day 3

• Cemented all the holes in the floor.
• By 9.30am I'd had enough and decided to go fishing instead.

Lessons learned;
Fishing is far more pleasurable than building work.

View attachment 102370

4th from the left, even after several Tremadol I'm still aching so much I'm struggling to hold up the 88 kilo yellowfin tuna.

200lb WOW... It looks like the guy on the lefts fish had a little argument with a shark on the way in?

 

[Marvo]

Lol, just over 190lb and it was the third biggest fish of the 14 fish in total. I've given away around 30 kilos this evening and still got more tuna steaks than I can fit in my freezers. The dinner menu in our house is going to be heavily tuna oriented for the next few months .

 

[Spare Tool]

Tuna mayo sandwich, tuna salad, tuna cream cheese jacket potato, tuna pasta bake, tuna and chilli pizza.. Jeezus gimi a burger!!

 

[Old Mod]

Looks like you had a great day Marvo, fair play.

 

[John861]

As above, normally i just stick tiles on. Why? because i love
it. A little bit sad really but that's what I am in this game for

HELLO

 

[Marvo]

HELLO

Hi John....are you lost?

 

[Marvo]

Day 4. A little more productive than day 3....which isn't saying much.

• Switch off water to house and drain pipework.
• Get sidetracked by a previously undiscovered back-syphoning issue between the split water supplies feeding the house. (Most of the house is fed by borehole water, the kitchen only is fed by municipal water....or so I thought until I accidentally discovered otherwise this morning.)
• Dry-fit basin and install 40mm drain pipework.
• Make lightly seared sesame tuna steaks for lunch.
  
• Reroute 22mm main plumbing feed to a more convenient route and tee in for basin and shower.
• Install 15mm hot and cold pipes to below basin fit angle valves.
• Install 15mm pipework for shower taps and cap-off for now.
• Cement pipework chases where possible.

Lessons learned;

1. I'm a painfully slow plumber.
2. Anytime you really need some time without interuptions a customer is guaranteed to phone with an emergency that means you have to drop everything.

 

[Marvo]

Basin pipework with shower pipes above and the re-routed main supply pipe to the right.

Plastered.

 

[Marvo]

I have a couple of questions if I may.

Firstly I can't decide if I should tile the floor first or the walls...

Second, where is the best place to start tiling for both the walls and the floor?

Lastly, and I realise this is probably a plumbing question rather than a tiling one, the new basin has knockouts for the taps. Do you just give them a whack with something to break them out or is there a more scientific way to ensure they fracture smoothly?

 

[J Sid]

I nearly always do the floor first....others may not.
setting out....what size tiles are you using and how do you want them, portrait or landscape, straight or staggered?

 

[WetSaw]

Knock out for tap not taps unless you like waving your hands under the hot then cold taps... I tap them out then tidy up with a diamond core drill.

I usually do floor first then I have a ( relatively..) level point to tile the walls from. Where to start depends on quite a lot of things!

 

[Marvo]

The walls are white bevel-edged metros laid landscape orientation in brick formation. Can't remember the exact size off-hand but they look the normal size if that helps.

The floor is 50x50 porcelain mosaics which come as 6x6 sheets.

There's no borders or fancy schmansy dado rails, just stainless trims to go into the external corners around the door and window.

 

[Boggs]

I tend to tile floors first then walls.

And knock out tap holes in ceramic with a thin nail punch and hammer, mine is around 2.5mm and start in centre to break through and work outwards to required size.

 

[Sintra]

@Marvo you’ve just spoilt my Christmas. I’ve a new bathroom suite sitting in my summer house patiently waiting to be installed. I’ve been putting it off for months now but the evil dragon indoors has made me promise to get the bathroom done over the Christmas break. After reading this thread I’m realising what I’m in for. Think the worst bit might be the arguments over 1 bathroom being out of use. Even when both are in use I still seem to have to wait patiently whilst banging doors and pleading to get in before I make a mess.

 

[Marvo]

Lol, evening Stevie.

Yeah, I don't have the problem with fighting for bathroom time, there's 5 bathrooms in total so even with 2 of them out of action at the moment there's still enough to go around.

I've been getting it in the neck from wifey about the dust though. I started telling her on Tuesday evening that the worst was over, knowing damn well it was going to get ten times worse. Then I spent the next couple of days trying to convince her it was just her imagination and it wasn't getting worse but the static reached a crescendo on Thursday so I just jacked and went fishing for the day instead.

Sounds to me like you might need to learn to fish

 

[Marvo]

Day 5...or is it 6? Can't remember and I guess it depends if you include the day I went fishing.

I'm now wishing I'd never started, it's taking too long.... probably because I'm doing things I don't do very often so I'm painfully slow. Most of my cuts from day 1 have healed but now my knees and back are sore. I'm really not having fun anymore and I want it to be over.

Is it just me or do you guys also go through this emotional rollercoaster as you progress through your jobs?

Anyway, enough self-pity for now.

I finished the plumbing.
Plastering finished.
Waterproofing of shower area finished.
Tiling has started.

Photos below for everything excluding the tiling because it looks rubbish at the moment and I'm a bit embarrassed.


Plumbing for the shower;

Plastered up;

Waterproofing done;

 

[WetSaw]

Apart from the fact I haven't seen separate valves like that used in a shower, why didn't you set them vertically to make your pipework easier?
I assume things are done differently over there!

 

[Marvo]

With hindsight I should have brought the horizontal supply side pipework in lower and made the pipe across to the shower head higher then I could gone straight in and out of the taps. It would have been a lot easier but by the time I realised I didn't want to upset wifey with more dust by grinding again.

There's no particular reason I got separate valves, there's all sorts of shower mixer taps available and also fancy ones with thermostatic type mixing valves. Just figured simply separate valves would work fine and they're budget friendly.

 

[Anthony Wills]

Good read and well done (So far) Marvo.....go on, be brave and show us the tiling, that's what we're all here for

 

[Waluigi]

I tend to use end feed Male iron connectors on shower valves. Just an observation. Great progress there Marvo!

 

[Marvo]

I didn't get anything done in the bathroom today, I had a couple of urgent calls and had to go do some real work for customers.

Here's the tiling pics I wasn't going to post until I'd had a chance to tidy things up a bit.

 

[Marvo]

I have another question please.

If you look at the gap in the metros in the second picture there's a gap with 2 tiles missing where there's an electrical conduit box in the wall.

How do I cut a 60mm round hole in the tiles to accomodate that? Unfortunately I don't have any fancy diamond cutters or anything like that, the closest I have might be a Dremmel tool or normal SDS drills etc.

 

[Blunt Tool]

I have another question please.

If you look at the gap in the metros in the second picture there's a gap with 2 tiles missing where there's an electrical conduit box in the wall.

How do I cut a 60mm round hole in the tiles to accomodate that? Unfortunately I don't have any fancy diamond cutters or anything like that, the closest I have might be a Dremmel tool or normal SDS drills etc.

Mark up a couple and take it to a tiler friend or colleague who would have the tools to do it

 

[WetSaw]

Have you got an angle grinder? A few diagonal cuts then tap it out with a hammer. If there's not a shroud going over it tidy it up with a tile file.

 

[Marvo]

Unfortunately I don't have any tiler colleagues. I'll try the angle grinder method, the worst that can happen is it will cost me a tile.

 

[Marvo]

I tried cutting slots into the tile with a grinder but it didn't pan out as planned, two scrap tiles and I tried the dremel approach. It was a bit tedious but after 20 minutes of dentistry it got there.