Before and After #30

Monday, 13 July 2015

My extremely long term readers (mum), might remember a previous before and after project involving our bathroom.  See Here (before) and Here (after).   I was pretty happy with it at the time. But it didn't solve the problem that our house only has one toilet. This has always worried me as I feared a nasty outcome if someone was sick, or two people were sick or whatever. It's always been in a separate room to the bathroom which is handy but I still fretted.

So for the past 5 years or more we've been slowly but surely working towards putting in an en-suite in the guest room below the house.  Our reasoning was that we'd be making a great studio type guest room with an en suite which we could use should there be toilet emergency one day. The access to the guest room is via the garden so it wouldn't be all that convenient, but it would be there.  We also optimistically thought there might also be a possibility to make some cash with AirBNB rentals.

So we've had plans drawn and submitted to council, we did a lot of excavation (and thus built a set of bike jumps with the dirt), we got underground pipes investigated and marked out.  We were almost ready to go.  

Then we went for a run together one weekend and chatted about the flat property market in Tasmania. Our house probably isn't worth much more than it was worth in 2006, unlike our Sydney friends whose skyrocketing house values will have them retiring in luxury in 20 years time.  We discussed the fact that we would be crazy to invest any money in the house that wasn't going to benefit us every day and also upon resale (not that we're planning to sell anytime soon), and as we ran we came to the realisation that doing the ensuite was a very expensive and difficult way of getting an extra toilet which probably wasn't going to be appreciated by any potential buyers anyway.

So that day, on that run, we decided to upgrade our existing bathroom instead. Replacing the old daggy leaky stuff and putting in a new toilet as well.  So we'd have a nice new bathroom that we'd get to enjoy every day, and a new toilet to boot.  It suddenly made a lot more sense to do that than spend a heap more money on an ensuite we'd rarely even see.

Compared to how long we'd been working towards the ensuite, our new bathroom was done in a flash. The following Monday I registered on a renovation website and had 3 builders contact me within 24 hours which was quite a shock.  I made appointments with all 3 of them but of course only one showed up (at exactly the agreed time I should mention). She turned out to be a designer/project manager (with a team of tradesmen) rather than a builder  so she basically took on the project completely and a week or two later she presented us with a complete design  and quote as well as presenting some tiling options on the same day. I was impressed.  So we agreed on the quote, we agreed on the start date (the Monday after I returned from India), and things were rolling.  

On the start date Georgina (the designer/project manager) and Michael the builder turned up at exactly 8am and got stuck straight into it.  We went from having an indoor bathroom..

to an outdoor bathroom..

As you can see we got the toilet next door upgraded with new stuff & tiles to match the bathroom - it's even exciting to have a new WC room.  

Oh and it turns out our renovation was timely as the water leaking from the exisiting shower had rotted the floor panels so it wouldn't have been all that long before an unsuspecting nude person would have the shower stall turn into a glass elevator which only went downwards.