After our week of exterior window painting, Dane and I were over in March doing a bathroom and cloak room refurbishment.  Our first job was to get isolating valves on all the relevant pipe work so we only had to drain down the system once.  Once that was done we stripped out the cloak room and then went on a shopping trip for materials.  On Tuesday Dane stripped out the bathroom while I set about tiling the cloak room walls, and then the following day Dane re-plasterboarded some of the bathroom walls and did some making good while I grouted the cloak room tiles and then got the toilet fitted.  Danny and Martin the electricians were on the job Thursday taking out the old electric shower unit and other fittings and then putting in some new spot lights and a new extractor fan.  While they did that me and Dane fitted the sink and ran in new waste pipe work so the cloak room was all finished off. 

We had some concerns with the bathroom floor prior to tiling it, mainly that it wasn’t very level and there seemed to be some other raised areas.  We decided to take all the flooring up and put in new floorboards so we could resolve the level issues and have a better surface to tile onto.  When we took up the floor boards we couldn’t believe what we saw, especially Dane as he is fairly new to the site work as it were.  The timber joists that support the floor area should be one length of timber running from one wall to another, but for some reason someone had cut out pieces of the original joists and inserted new timber, and then bolted more timber alongside the joists to act as a support and trying to strengthen them! It was basically a cut and shut floor, and a poor one at that.  If left as it were it could have become a serious issue one day.  Unfortunately we had to raise this issue with the client and they decided to meet the extra cost to have things put right.  On our return from the Bank Holiday weekend Dane and I set about putting in the new joists.  We carried out the work at cost as we didn’t feel it was right to profit from the client’s misfortune.  After a couple of days we completed the work and had new floorboards down and a nice level floor to work off.

On Thursday we laid the new floor tiles and had an early finish as we let the tile adhesive set.  On Friday we got the new bath fitted and all plumbed in.  In the pm I got the main wall tiled while Dane did some making good of the walls prior to us fitting the skirting and we then finished off the day by grouting the floor tiles.