Hunter Extraordinaire

Those of you that have been following this blog for a little while will know that Gumtree is like my Internet home away from home. I've bought more of the things in our house from that site than I can even count.

So, when I decided that I wanted to be special and find a piece of furniture for our downstairs bathroom vanity that could be painted like our fancy upstairs vanity cabinet, guess where I headed?

But unlike our upstairs cabinet, which we just happened to already own as a piece of furniture and which was almost exactly the right size to span one wall in our upstairs bathroom, the downstairs cabinet presented me with more problems. I searched for months and months and months.

See I wanted something along these kinds of lines.

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But of course I didn't want to pay the exorbitant price that that kind of vanity undoubtedly costs. So, Gumtree searching it was! Most 1-metre-wide (which was all the space we had to work with) dressers tend to be divided into two columns of drawers, with a central board running straight down the middle like this one (listed for $80), which first caught my eye because of its slightly fancy legs.

But since my bathroom vanity plan would involve waste plumbing needing to run straight down the middle of the cabinet underneath the bowl centred on top, that would mean some seriously complicated mucking around with the inner workings of the cabinet and all of the drawers.

So I narrowed my search to options where the plumbing would have a free run down the middle. I found this option listed for $100, and drove all the way across town to have a look at it, but it was a bit damaged, and the drawers didn't run smoothly, so I had to move on...

And found nothing for so long that I started considering other ways to accomplish my plan. I found these two bedside tables that I thought I could sit a little apart from each other with the sink bowl centred between them on a panel of glass. That would obviously mean that I'd need some fancy chrome plumbing rather than the ordinary plastic stuff, but I was getting a bit desperate.

Then they got snapped up by someone else, and I was back to the drawing board. I drove all the way to yet another side of town to have a look at this guy...

 

But he was a bit of a weird mix of real timber and plastic veneer, so I wasn't confident about painting him.

Until finally... FINALLY, I found this guy, and the long hunt was over!

I adore those fancy Queen Anne legs and the shape of the mirror on the back, and best of all, there are THREE columns of drawers, so we just need to cut out the back of the middle ones for the plumbing, and our problems are solved!

So I snapped him up for about $150, and then my furniture hunt became a spray-painter hunt. The car sprayer that originally sprayed our upstairs cabinet, dining table and bathtub was now apparently much busier than he was two years ago, so he wasn't interested in mucking around spraying timber furniture anymore.

So this was how the bathroom looked for quite a while.

 

I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of my spray-painter search, and just cut to the good part. After getting quotes in excess of $1,000 from a couple of people that made me want to faint, I eventually found someone who quoted $350 to do it. And they collected it and delivered it back to me when it was done!!!

So then... we had this!

Isn't it gorgeous?!!!!!

There are still a few things we need to take care of... you can see in this shot that the top middle drawer is missing, because we need to shorten it in order to make room for the waste plumbing. And we also need to install drawer handles and paint and mount the mirror to the wall above.

The gloss black of the vanity works in beautifully with the gloss black brick tile on the opposite wall. Just how I wanted it! It was totally worth the pain.

So in terms of price, it still wasn't particularly cheap. At $150 for the original piece, $350 for the painting, about $100 for the ceramic bowl on top, and about $35 for new drawer handles we're looking at a total cost of $635. But we did also get the mirror included in the original price, which with a bit of gloss black spray paint will look fantastic above the vanity, so that's saved us at least $100 that we might otherwise have spent on a mirror.

And a quick Internet search just proved to me that a super boring ordinary vanity cabinet like this one still runs at nearly $600 anyway.

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And I know I'm biased, but isn't this about a thousand times better?

It's Bathtime

That's right, forget Christmas-time, we've got a much more important time to talk about.

It's bathtime.

Here's our downstairs bathroom when it had been waterproofed.

And here's the little bathroom drawn into our house plans. Shower over bath on the left, toilet in back right corner, vanity in front right corner. And that's exactly how it was plumbed in (except the shower is on the front left wall instead of the back left).

You've already got to enjoy my dithering on the subject of tiling choices and shower curtains vs. glass in this post a while ago, where I briefly entertained the idea of going with a dramatic black and white stripe option for the tiling.

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Most of you will be relieved to hear that I decided to reign in my enthusiasm a little on that idea, and settled on going for a small subway-tile-size black tile, to be laid like a brick wall along the wall above the bath.

I'm so happy with it. It looks even better grouted, and for the grand ol' price of $22 per square metre for the tile, it's got to be one of the cheapest feature tile walls I've managed!

But then there's the question of the opposite wall. The one with the toilet and vanity on it.

 

And here comes more dithering. At the time when I was contemplating what to do with this bathroom I was also watching past episodes of the Australian TV show 'The Block', and happened to snap this screenshot of Jason and Kirsten's bathroom in Season 2.

I know it's horribly blurry, but it's clear enough to get the idea. And the idea it gave me was that we could do a similar thing with a bumped-out tile shelf along the right wall, letting us do two very useful things:
1) Have a hidden cistern wall-mounted toilet = fanciness
2) Have a wall of mirrored vanity cabinets above it = storage usefulness

It seemed like an extremely sensible idea. Which of course meant that I wasn't convinced.

See, I had my heart set on getting something like this for our vanity cabinet.

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With a big ridiculous mirror like this (but in gloss black) above it.

Sourced from a Gumtree ad listing this for sale for $110

And that just wasn't going to work with my sensible shelf and boring mirror cabinets, was it?

So I thought... and dithered... and thought...

And eventually, it came down to three things:

1) Recessed cistern toilets are expensive. And I had plans to only spend the same $200 that we spent on our upstairs toilet on the downstairs toilet.
2) Boring made-in-China mirrored bathroom cabinets are EXPENSIVE! I remember in our last house we bought two single cabinets and one double cabinet from Bunnings for our ensuite, which ran us at over $100 each, so for this 2m long wall in the downstairs bathroom we'd probably be looking at $500-$600 just for plain stock-standard mirrored cabinets.
3) The fancy glossy black vanity idea (which would probably run us at thousands and thousands of dollars if I was able to find one in a shop - which in itself is unlikely) would be fairly cheap to accomplish if I could find a second-hand timber dresser and get it spray-painted gloss black just like we did with our upstairs vanity cabinet.

So, guess what? For what may be the first time in history, the fancy, designer-ey, more expensive-looking option was likely to cost us just a fraction of the non-fancy, sensible, functional option!

So, we forged ahead with the original bathroom plan (i.e. without any pre-framed shelves built into the walls). The tiler came to lay the bed on the floor, which had to be super deep so that we would only have a small step down into the room from our raised-height hallway. It took him six layers of bedding, with about 30 bags of sand!

Here it was in its finished state.

And then he tiled it. We used the same 300mm x 600mm off-white porcelain tiles that we used in the upstairs bathroom and ensuite.

 

And ran the same tile all the way up the walls to the ceiling.

So that took care of that side of the room. And the other side of the room was looking pretty great with my glossy black brick tile wall and all of the shower and bath taps installed...

And the other side looked a bit alright as well... except for that top corner where the cornice is missing.

Here's where another grand plan went horribly awry.

I had stumbled across this picture online while we were still in the early stages of planning the bathroom. And I thought... brilliant! That shelf at the end of the bathtub makes great use of that extra otherwise-wasted space, and in our case, even with our 1700mm long bath we would still definitely have enough room at the end to do something similar.

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So, I began a search for secondhand timber bookcases that could be enlisted for this role. And I found this guy for the grand price of $80.

Wouldn't he look lovely painted the same colour as our wall tiles?

He would. So, the carpenters built that ledge at the end of the bath up so that he would nestle nicely all the way up to the ceiling, the plasterers left the cornice off in that corner, and the tiler didn't bother cutting those tiles in the corner off at the cornice edge, because they would be covered up anyway.

But then we hit a snag. The bookcase was a bit too wide to fit on the ledge at the end of the bath, so the plan had been for the carpenters to pull one side off, trim all of the shelves etc, and then put him back together at the correct width.

But it turns out that Mr Bookcase had not only been pretending to be real solid timber (he was actually real timber veneer pieces covering easily-affected-by-moisture bones of MDF board. Plus, all of the timber pieces were glued rather than nailed, which meant that dismantling him without damaging him beyond repair was nigh impossible.

So now we are bookcase-less. And have to decide whether we bite the bullet and just cut off the tiles and finish off the cornice in that corner, or build our own bookcase from scratch.

What do you think?

We're Not Into Crack

The life of a homeowner seems to be a constant battle against cracks (see here for the last battle installment).

Well there are other cracks that we have been assiduously ignoring (i.e. not putting pretty little pink crosses over them) ever since we moved into this house all of two years ago.

The cracks in our upstairs lounge and dining room ceilings. Which, I've just realised after comparing that above photo taken recently and this older one from when we moved in (see the telltale yellow walls?), appear to have been getting steadily worse.

Case in point... I took this shot the day the roof was replaced and I could see sunlight through the dining room ceiling.

Not ideal.

So! While my carpenters were at a loose end waiting for the plasterers to get the downstairs area re-plastered before they could go on with the rest of their work, I decided to set them to work on my poor upstairs ceilings.

First step? To create utter chaos in the dining and lounge rooms.

And by extension, the bedroom...

And even the bathroom.

And then they began ripping away the worst affected sections of the ceiling. Well, I should say "cutting" away, since the last thing we wanted was for the whole thing to come crashing down, and for those lovely ceiling roses in the middle to be damaged.

The ceiling itself was pretty fascinating. It was made up of this really coarse stuff with horsehair through it. No wonder the poor ceilings are drooping and sagging in some areas.

With the most damaged panels removed, they replaced them with fibre cement sheeting and put up new timber trim to match the old trim.

And then they moved on to the lounge ceiling, created a bit more chaos, and repeated the process! Allie tried her utmost to get underfoot as much as possible. And succeeded.

So then, wonderful brother that he is, Daniel got to work puttying and no-more-gaps-ing the screw holes and borders of each section so that we could one day have a fairly seamless ceiling again.

 And as much as the checkerboard effect had a certain charm...

It had to go. So Daniel sacrificed his arms and neck for the cause, and got up there and undercoated like there was no tomorrow!

Meaning that that worst area in the dining room went from this... to this!

The lounge is looking a lot neater too...

Although we've still got a lot of work ahead of us before either of these ceilings will look as they should. The ceiling rose in the lounge in particular needs quite a bit of paint-scraping attention before we can give it all a good proper couple of coats of paint.

That job is going to have to wait for another day, though. Too many more important things to get done first!