And tossed out as much of the old stuff in the old house as we could.
But this we couldn't toss out.
Well, except for that incredibly awful shower curtain and other crusty old lady bathroom accessories. The rest we were stuck with, at least until we figured out another bathroom arrangement, because this was the one and only bathroom in the house!
Let's zoom in on the shower, just for fun.
Sigh. Those yellow tiles were actually some kind of laminate board made to look like tiles. Clearly they weren't designed for the 50-or-so years of shower use that they've had, so the lower bits of the board were simply disintegrating. Someone attempted to bridge the gap with a random piece of lineoleum, the grey thing you see sticking out beneath the jagged rotten edge of the yellow board. Eugh.
Of course there were a few other issues with the shower, including the fact that only one of the taps worked (thankfully it was the hot tap), so that meant that you had to complete your shower in the very small window of time when the water was heating up from stone cold to boiling hot. Without touching the wall, of course, because if you did that you'd have to have another shower just to feel even remotely clean again.
Oh, and the bottom of the tub was a bit crusty. So again, shower required to feel clean from your shower.
I think I've made my point. So, for the first few weeks that we lived in the house, we drove over to my brother's place most nights for a shower. Not exactly convenient, but there are worse problems in life.
Like the one that hit us next.
Yes, the toilet. It was old, it was ugly, but it worked. At least we thought it did. Until we realised that there was a bad smell under the house a few weeks later. It turned out that one of the sewerage pipes was clogged, and nothing was getting through. We hired an electric eel, which we had some experience with at our last place (see here), and couldn't make it through the apparent blockage. I'll spare you the rest of the gory details.
So here we were in our new house with no shower, and now no toilet. Oh, and I was newly pregnant. And working from home. Remind me why we renovate again?
The solution we came up with? To abandon that bathroom entirely, and to plumb in a new temporary bathroom in an empty room on the other side of the house. Easy peasy!
We invested in the cheapest toilet that money could buy from Bunnings (still about a thousand times better than the one we had), and Tom worked some DIY magic connecting it to the plumbing running underneath the house for the nearby kitchen.
But how to solve our shower problem without spending too much and creating too much work for ourselves?
Gumtree to the rescue with this beauty!
And in case it's not immediately apparent what the beauty actually is, it's a giant all-in-one fibreglass bath and shower that we got from someone renovating their own house for the grand total of $50. With taps, showerhead, even some plumbing included! Hallelujah!
The doorway to the room did require some alterations in order to actually get the thing in there, but...
Once it was in, voila! Instant shower!
Well, instant shower after a bit more home handyman plumbing work.
And it too was about a thousand times better than our existing one!!! Need I show you this again?
It's got to be the ugliest bathroom renovation we've ever done by a very very long way, but at this stage it's function over form! Plus, it unfortunately feels like we've moved sideways rather than forward since we've invested time and effort in something that's not going to stick around in the long run. But we've got a very long road before we can have the bathroom(s) of our dreams, and at least we can now travel that road with the certainty of a decent shower at the end of the day!
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