Getting there...

Well its been a while since the last post but we are slowly getting there. The ceiling and upper walls are complete and painted (not quite as smooth as they could have been but in most light they look ok). Wooden paneling on the lower part of the walls is more or less complete.

Bath is plumbed in but not yet tested. Had a bit of a disaster when the pipe sheares at the elbow connection when tightening up the bath taps -- had to rip off some of the panelling to get to the pipes. The soldered joint was fine -- the fitting itself sheared (proves that theres no need to braze the pipes as they do here in France, soldering is fine).


Had to get a 150mm damper valve from the UK for the ventilation pipe as they seem not to be available in France. Ended up getting it from some dodgy Hydroponics ebay shop.

Next step is to source some flooring. Currently thinking of Acacia.

Heating and Shower!!!!!

well we now have insulation, heating and best of all a posh shower -- feels like you are in a hotel! We even have a door on the bathroom (with a lock!)
Next step is to finish (read start) the paneling for the lower part of the walls.

Its a shower Jim, but not as we know it

Tiling the shower walls:

Headway!

Really feels like Im starting to get somewhere. Eventually managed to source some fibre-cement sheeting from Eternit (Hydropanel) Their sales rep Stephane was very helpful and got Point P of Lons to order 10 sheets for me. The sheets arrived with 20 sheets of normal plasterboard in between downpours and its now all stacked in the hall.

Have installed a pulley system (yet to be tested) to get the sheeting up the stairs as it weighs significantly more than the 10mm p.board.

While waiting for the sheeting, I decided to demolish the downstairs toilet to make way for the larder -- still a work in progress :-)

 
 

Some progress at last! Inlet plumbing for shower completed as well asjustments to central heating plan and feeds for extra radiators.

Progress at last

Over year and almost nothing achieved?! It was time to do something!

OK so while Claire took the kids to visit their grandparents in the UK, I had about 4.5 days to try and get somewhere with the bathroom. The main goal was to move the bog and get the false floor in place. This was a fairly major task and would require the bog and water supply to be disrupted over a couple of days at least. Hence why we waited till most of the family were out. Once the false floor was in place, we would be able to continue work bit by bit without any huge pressure to get it finished.

I had already prepared most of the floor joists in steel (improving my stick welding technique with each one). By the time Claire and the kids had returned I had pretty much achieved what I had planned to get done:
Remove existing toilet
Install floor joists and enough flooring to install new toilet
Plumb in new toilet
Tidy outlet from boiler
Plumb in basin
Move shower cubicle from downstairs to new upstairs bathroom

Demolishing and virtual progress

OK we found a bit of spare time and attacked the bathroom with hammers. Result: removed the chimney and now have space to put in the bath.
















I have also brushed up on my ShipConstructor and AutoCAD skills to model the pipework that we are going to need to put in and to check that there will be space to fit all the items we want to get in. For the techies, the initial modelling was done using Maxsurf (during alpha-stage debugging). This was then exported to ShipConstructor (which runs inside AutoCAD to do the detailed modelling and pipe layouts.