Bathroom renovation series part 1

August 2012 we decided to hire a contractor to renovate our bathroom. This decision was made after an incident involving plumbing and horrible, horrible smells.


After living with a dripping furnace in there, a shower that was always an adventure to use (agreed our housesitter), and the horrible smells, we went to the bank and got the loan.

Little did we know that exorbitant amount of money was not going to be enough, and 18 months later would not be enough time to finish. Though it is still not quite done, I am sick of not blogging about this so now is the time.

We didn't have the world's worst bathroom. Isn't there a website about that? But it was identical in color theme to my grandparents', and had scenes from Asia in the wall tile *cringe*. For some reason bathrooms in Germany are made completely of tile.

This bathroom was added onto the house in the 30s. Before that it was a goat shed/lean-to against the house. From 1890 to the 30s, apparently people were lucky enough not to require bathrooms in their daily lives.

Let's see the bathroom on the day we found this house, Winter 2008.



The only thing I like about this tile is the color grey. I can't have enough grey in my house: ) You can see in this photo the flushing apparatus is one of the very oldest you'll see in Germany. Very loud and sometime you get wet.



The edging around the window proves the tile was installed by our "two-right-hand" former owner. He thought he could do everything himself. He did, just, appallingly poorly. You can see the discolored edge to the tile, and the grout was always discolored with mold. As you can see, two people cannot fit in this shower.




Washing machine in the bathroom, this is normal in Germany because people don't have mud rooms or pantries. Or closets. Closets do not exist in Germany.  I've actually seen washing machines built into kitchens when the bathrooms are too small for them.




I cringe to look at this photo of our old furnace. Drip, drip, drip. We had to keep a bucket under it the last year. The dripping from this thing would cause us grief as soon as we started this project. Not only grief, but another unexpected sum of money.




The floor tiles were loose and the grout was crumbling up in chunks. I actually don't mind this grey patterned floor, it hid dirt pretty well. That under-sink cabinet was made of some sort of cardboard with sticky paper coating. It rotted in the rain within days once I took it outside.




All of the toiletries on display, what choice did they have?






We never used this bathtub. I mean, not for bathing ourselves. We're not bath people. (Hot tubs, yes! But I've never met anyone with a hot tub in Germany.) Instead I used this tub to mix up Baasha's beet pulp every day.



They kept a very clean toilet, but the brown water(?) stains were permanent (not shown).




Our neighbors have olive green fixtures in their bathroom. It could be worse.
 
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OK Wanna see it get torn up a bit? I know, I can't leave you with the image of that bathroom untorn.


Ah good you can see the ceiling - exactly what we have in the living room too.




Bye bye tub, floor, and furnace. My husband would want me to clarify that before the bathroom project, we had replaced the furnace with a completely new system in the basement. It still heats with water in the radiators, but the entire house had to be re-piped and that meant our floors had holes we had to leap over for a long time. It seems to me that these renovation projects are mostly about putting  holes in my home. I have holes in the ceiling now, floor, and walls.




In the middle of the bathroom is a big chimney for the old furnace that would have to go. Here you can see its base, that concrete slab in the middle.




Here is the hole in the roof for the chimney. They had a tarp up there temporarily and I loved the sound of the rain hitting it. I wanted to keep it as a skylight but my man wanted to add a thick layer of insulation over the entire room, oh well. Another good thing about getting rid of that furnace - the chimney on the outside of the house was built extremely tall in case anyone wanted to build a second story above the bathroom (WTH?). So it stuck up at least 3 meters into the air and had to be supported by steel beams. I was so glad to see that thing go.




The back door didn't use to be in the bathroom. There was a tiny little room there with a second (third) door. That room wasn't quite big enough to turn around in, so we decided it could go, and we could have a bathroom with a door to the outside. This door never worked, not a single day we lived here. It was swollen from being on the weather side of the house with no porch or over hang at all, and the wood had grown into the wall. I thought it was unkind that the former owner hid this from us when he sold us the house. (The front door had trouble opening and closing too, but he hid that from us as well.) Anyway, this back door was full of splits in the wood, and you could look through them, and wind blew through. I put tape over the vents to try to keep out some cold air. (The vents were there because there was a propane-burning furnace in the bathroom.) When we finally removed that door, I wish I had a photo - my man just ripped it into pieces with his bare hands. Then we made a fire.


It's never locked - it didn't have the "open or close" functionality of doors.




For a few days we still had a toilet....




...then there was this. Like camping, we went outside in the middle of the night with a flashlight to pee. It got old very quickly. But nothing was as bad as not having a shower.

FOR SIX MONTHS.

We had to wash our hair in our kitchen sink for 6 long months. Occasionally we'd go to J's parents and use a real shower and that was pure heaven.

I was getting pretty upset about this contractor who always had an excuse why he couldn't come over -- illness, injury, other jobs. Also, every single thing he's done here has had to be re-done or fixed by someone else. Nothing has gone as planned or correctly, but when I talk to people they say that's how it is with contractors, they screw up and take shortcuts. 18 months later he still has the same excuses. Right now, this month anyway, it's illness again.