How to get a new bathroom
This could be quite a long one...

I took possession of my house in the middle of May last year. I knew when I bought it that it was a project house and that it'd be a couple of months before I could even move in, but that didn't bother me. (When it's finished, hopefully in a couple of years, it'll be utterly fantastic. It has a cellar. Envy me.)

Anyhoo... One of my first priorities was the bathroom. The old one was perfectly serviceable, but it was decorated with a really nasty tongue-and-groove wood panelling, and the tiles on the splashbacks were pink floral things. Of more immediate concern, though, was the fact that the panelling on the wall along the side of the bath was distinctly convex.

My Dad is a DIY sort of person: he's pretty good at it, too. Being a teacher, and with the May half term being the week after I got my keys, he volunteered to come and have a look at the place. Granted that I was going to get a pro in to replaster the bathroom, he would be able at least to take off some of the panelling so that we knew the state of the mysteriously bendy wall underneath. And removing the panelling would mean less work for the builder, therefore less cost for me.

I decided to swing by the house on my way home from the office to see what Dad had found. What I found was a wet, dirty and apologetic couple of parents at the top of the stairs. "We think we owe you a new carpet," Mum said, a little sheepishly. She told me what had happened.

Sensibly, before removing any of the panelling, Dad had put a board across the bath to keep it rubble free. He had removed a small piece of the wall-covering, but then decided that he needed to nip out to B&Q for something.

It would appear that the tongue-and-groove was held onto the wall (and ceiling - did I mention that even the ceiling was wood panelled? No? It was.) by nothing more than vertigo and a following wind. Removing one small piece had disturbed its never-stable equilibrium, and, while Dad was out, the convex part of the wall decided to make a bid for freedom, taking much of the rest of the wall and ceiling with it. The bathtaps were - and are - vertically mounted; one was turned on by a piece of falling detritus.

You'll remember that there was a board over the bath. The water from the tap didn't, therefore, go down the plughole. It cascaded over the side of the bath onto the floor, where it mixed with the dust and rubble.

Half an hour later, Dad got back.

On the upside, the result was that the bathroom went from being something that I really wanted to replace and refit to something that I really needed to replace and refit. I now have a lovely bathroom.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 9:40, 15 replies)

...
am intrigued by cellar. Have you checked for bodies? Or tunnels? Or buried treasure? If I had a cellar, that's what I'd do.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 9:51, closed)

As a student in manchester
We looked at a house near Withington that had a cellar that contained a massive stone altar. Very scary place. I'm pretty sure there must have been bodies somewhere.
(Bazongaloid, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 9:57, closed)

^
That is so cool! You could keep your infinite monkeys there, maybe. It would look like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:00, closed)

My cellar...
At the moment, my cellar has nothing in it beyond a second freezer for the vast amounts of fruit I pick every summer, some half-empty tins of paint...



... and Steve Fossett.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:02, closed)

^
is he tucked between your Shergar fillets?
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:06, closed)

CHCB
I thought that Shergar was with you.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:10, closed)

.
You lucky b'stard a project house and with a cellar! I would love to find a house to do up but find that "property developers" have bought up every interesting house in this area so they can paint them magnolia and slap a bit of laminate flooring in and call it a renovation and then add several thousand pounds to the price.
(cmouse is pondering about life in other jobs, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:12, closed)

Cellars are great
My grandparents' house, apart from being held together with six inch nails, had 5 (five) cellars. When the family cleared out the house after the GPs died, we found all manner of hilarious junk. But no bodies.

My uncle has a nice house. The place itself has the usual housey merits, but the one which seals it for me is the large room above the garage which he has full of junk.

I want a house with a big junk room. Or perhaps a 40 foot shed.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:14, closed)

@Enzyme
who do y'think I am, Catherine the Great? Nah, Lord Lucan borrowed him for a morning gallop.

Edit: @K2k6 - I have a junk 'room'. It's a walk-in cupboard that was probably once a toilet. It's amazing how much crap I can fit in there. I can't enlarge the kitchen until I rehouse the junk, and my roofspace access is too small for an adult human (why make an access hatch that measures 30cm by 20cm?).
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:14, closed)

@CHCB
You need to get hold of a street urchin and use him as an 'attic boy', when you want stuff shifted 'twixt living space and attic.

Mind you, the hatch rather limits the size of the junk you can put up there.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:19, closed)

^
I do actually have a cunning plan about stealing gainfully employing the disaffected youth of today and putting them to slavery work to benefit society (i.e. me). If I take an eco-friendly/Fair Trade/organic approach then everyone will embrace this and I'll get the approval of the Guardian-reading masses.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 10:21, closed)

Cellars FTW!
In my student house we had a HUGE cellar, complete with lettle seperate rooms and everything.

We held our annual Halloween party there. Ah, the good old days. *drifts in to soft-eyed remembrance*

So yes, I do envy you. But I shall click you nonetheless...
( Devil_In_Tights the *real* DiT!, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 12:16, closed)

Junk
I think I have a junk house with some small areas for living in. Where does all the stuff come from?
(misspiggy In danger of having to get a job, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 15:53, closed)

my loft-y thing
the upstairs at my house is just as good as a cellar.

The acceses is by a pull down staircase and there are lots of lovely hold-the-ceiling-up bits of wood that I'd just love to tie someone to.

But the best bit is that when it was renovated and the plasterboard lining was put in, the builder didn't want to go all the way to the egde of the slanty walls so the last 60cm or so is perpendicular to the floor. This soumds perfectly normal, but he put little doors on the resulting crawlspace and even provided them with locks and me with the keys.

So one day I am going to trick someone into getting in there and I'm going to lock it. If they're really good (I don't know what that entails whilst locked in a lightless space just big enough to crawl around on your stomach, but I'll figure it out) I may just let them out one day.

if you looked at the door-thingy's that's what you'd be thinkning too, that's why you're here.
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Sat 5 Apr 2008, 4:51, closed)

My house
My sitting room is my cellar, which leads out onto the garden that you wouldn't have thought existed if you saw the house from the front!
(Lord Monkey of Yorkshire,OBE killed a gipsy on...., Sat 5 Apr 2008, 12:40, closed)