Half the height, twice the difficulty

April 2015 and we're getting on with the bathroom.

You know when you do a job and then you forget to photo-document it?

Here's the photo of our lovely loo before starting the remaining shower walls:

And here it is with the half-walls built, semi-clad and the floor tiles nearly completed!

It's a bit of a time-lapse, I grant you. Here's the order of jobs:

• The end and side half-walls for the shower enclosure have been built. If you look at the previous post, they couldn't be built until the shower tray had been installed. They were really wobbly when I first built them but the application of lots nails and screws sorted that out. They have to be really rigid because I'm tiling them. Flexible adhesive & grout is really only designed for very minor movement. Anything major and it'll crack right off.
• The wall behind the WC has been studded out (not sure that's the right term...) as the down waste is too far from the external wall. No-one, and I repeat, NO-ONE wants to move the WC waste. It's at times like this that we really miss Paul's dad in a very practical way. As a general builder he would have shown up the day after we'd told him about it and sorted it out. Ah well, padding out the wall will give us a nice deep window board.
• The shower walls have been clad in ply. Exterior grade on the inside and standard (cheaper) on the outside.
• Most of the floor tiles have been laid. I chose to lay them with a join at the corner of the shower enclosure. It's always worth working out how to have the minimum corner cuts. Floor tiles are made of porcelain to maximize their strength. This makes anything other than straight cuts a real challenge.

You might have noticed that the WC is at a strange angle? This is a handy feature of having it's waste going down - it was easy to rotate it to lay the floor tiles underneath, waiting for one lot to set before rotating back to finish. The cistern is not operational, of course, but a bucket of water suffices as a flush when necessary!It's a bit basic having to use a bucket to flush the WC but it's worth remembering that we still don't have the luxury of a door on the bathroom at this point so...not many friends wanted to visit us at this point!

More about tiling in the next blog