Today did not go totally smoothly. In the end I think it’s worked out okay. I’m wondering if I should have wound the heating up a bit – for reasons that I’ll explain…
So, I committed to installing the toilet today. I’d got my plan, I’d worked everything out. There is less clearance than I thought, but I collected a variety of pipes this morning, and set to on the plumbing.
Having dismantled the old plumbing that I’d spent time installing (grr), I spent a while shuffling the toilet back and forth and trying to work out just exactly how much space I had. The answer – not much.
But by enlarging the hole in the wall, and removing the hot pipe which was to feed the bidet, and making the 90 degree actually sit with its join inside the wall (and the exiting pipework pretty much flush to the tile), it was possible to cram the toilet in.
I hooked up the cold side, made sure the valves to the sink were turned off, and turned on the cold side.
Running my fingers around the join (which I could do, because the hot is actually capped off inside the wall for the sake of cramming this whole bloody lot in), there were no leaks. Yay! Okay, so onward with fitting. Well, first there was cleaning the tiles behind the toilet (since they’ll never be reachable again). Then grouting and cleaning the floor tiles (also not really reachable again).
And then I wandered past the front door to grab something and…
Well…shit.
Thankfully it turned out to be very simple. It’s just that the nipples for the sink had got unscrewed – probably while I was futzing with the taps – and…were leaking, horribly.
Of course, now… many hours later – the floor’s dry, but the wall is taking longer to dry out. Because it’s full of soggy glass fibre and wood. Which is terrifying me. Hence the – should I have wound up the heating – thought. Didn’t think of it before I left though.
There were a couple more hours of futzing around, and irritatingly, one of the stainless steel screws I was using broke, but…
Ta-fucking-da :)
Yup, if you squint, it’s looking quite bathroomy. I hideously misjudged the amount of grouting I could do in the time I’d allotted – which meant having started working at 7am this morning I didn’t finish until 6pm this evening. Which is a long-ass day. I still ended up semi-abandoning the grout – I’ll have to attack it with vinegar when I get back from my little LA jaunt (LA Autoshow for Transport Evolved). Still, I think I’ve got the grout down enough that it should just be final polish cleaning up, which is not too awful. So there’s just the bath sections to do, and the ‘ornamental’ bit along the wall, which I think I’ve worked out how to do (delicate type masking tape, mostly folded over so there’s a minimal point of contact, stuck suuuper lightly to the plaster, then carefully apply the grout in such a way as to not get it on the plaster, then whip the tape off).
To be fair, while it was a long day for me, the garage builders were still at it when I left, since they think they can get the garage finished today. Which is kinda exciting.
But not as exciting as this:
