pour améliorer: Making the Bathroom Work

When we returned from overseas, the first priority was to get our bathroom operational. All our efforts to get it working before we left got it about 95% complete, and then drill bits broke and we had to finish packing and our fence had to be built, and we almost missed the train to catch our flight. The bathroom had to give.

Daniel coped with the old bathroom fairly well in our absence, but we wanted to be able to use the new one!

So Tom first finished plumbing in the toilet...

Hopefully this is the only time he spends in this position.

Then it was time to attack the shower head, so that we could shower without having to hold the thingie (that's a very technical word for the shower head, by the way).

In our earlier attempts to accomplish this, we had managed to immediately break a $30 drill bit. So we approached this task with a bit of trepidation. We paid another visit to Bunnings, where a very helpful guy suggested we buy the cheapest version of the drill bit for about $6, and gave us a few tips on how to get the most out of it. Slow and steady wins the race, essentially.

The hardest part is getting through the glaze on the porcelain tiles.

The new drill bit worked a charm, and the support thingie (there's that word again) for the shower head was up relatively painlessly this time around.

Hurrah! We can have showers with no hands!

Then we moved on to attaching the shower curtain rail, since the idea of covering the entire bathroom in water when showering didn't really appeal to me.

That involved a lot of this.

In case that wasn't obvious, it involved Tom drilling in fits and starts while I sprayed water into the hole to cool things down.

Yes, I am wearing sunglasses for eye protection.

We pulled out the big guns (or screws) for attaching the curtain rail, to give it as much strength as possible. For those not in the know (like me not so long ago), you push this arrow-style through the hole you've made, and let the little wings go all the way through. Then when you tighten the screw, the wings will latch onto the back of the wall (or tile in our case), and give the screw more strength, so you can put more weight on it without fearing it pulling through the wall again.

With the curtain rod attachment ready, we broke out the shower curtain!

I first spotted this shower curtain at a friend's house, and immediately dashed out of the bathroom (don't worry, I did stop to make sure my hands were washed) and demanded to know where it came from. The answer? $17 at Freedom. So I scheduled a visit that very week, and bought two.

Unfortunately they didn't come with their own rings, so we were forced to recycle some of the rusty ones from our original bathroom.

It didn't take me long to then upgrade them to something a little less grotty.

We decided to attach the curtain before attaching the rod completely, just to make things more complicated for ourselves.

And then Tom had to become a bit of an acrobat in order to fit it to the wall.

Last step for the rod was to give it a third anchor point at the bottom of the 'U' shape.

We had to improvise a bit with what we had on hand, so it isn't the most attractive solution right now.

Next step? Towel rails!

And then a little door stop next to the toilet, so the door doesn't crash into the toilet whenever it's opened too enthusiastically.

Works like a charm.

The all-important toilet-roll holder...

We decided to place it in the middle of our feature tile strip. Amazingly enough it feels a little less blatantly conspicuous there.

A hand towel rail...

And then, we finally pulled out our FRACK mirror that we bought from IKEA before we moved into our last house, thinking we would put it somewhere there. Never happened.

And we popped it near the bath, to help our boys with shaving. It's actually also quite useful for putting on make-up, since our vanity cabinet is quite deep, meaning that standing in front of it you're too far away from the mirror to be able to see yourself properly.

Last but definitely not least, we had to do something about the fact that standing in the bath taking a shower puts you directly in front of the bathroom window. Since our shower curtains are not exactly opaque, we had to do something about that, for the sake of the neighbours (and my delicate modesty).

We bought a blind from Bunnings that was 900mm wide, and then discovered that the window cavity is 870mm wide. Drat. Then came the painstaking process of removing every slat (which wasn't as easy as with the other blinds we've had before) and cutting them down to size