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Here are a few photos of the refurbished bathroom when done, including the 'ease of use' items such a shower seat, except for a few finishing touches. (There are a couple of 'before aids added' photos which I have left in.) There is one more post to follow in this series, which will talk about a couple of final touches, and detail the costs of the project. [Edit: Added bonus video from the "Recommendations for Bathrooms for Elderly / Disabled" forum thread created for this project]

This project has now been going for a week, and should be finished with just under another day of work. Tiling and grouting has been done, and it is now just to fit the shower, the loo, and install shower screen and those grab handles etc that we have obtained so far. Then it will a case of experimenting and putting the final touches in as the shower is used. Here are a few slightly rushed photos taken at this stage. Two runs of pipe installed for the future just in case, which go through to where most of the plumbing related gubbins live beyond the other end of the bathroom. Shower tray protected from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Access hatch for future maintenance Give it a shout - get on and grout. It's Friday. Nice corner detail Stay out and let it set If anyone has any bright ideas, I need to have a set of hooks about a foot below these. Is there any product that hangs hooks off the other hooks? We should have wrapped up by Monday afternoon, and I'll aim to do one more piece, with details and costs.

At the end of day two ... the shower tray is in. I was planning a moulded non-slip shower tray, but these are proving elusive without a special order so I have gone for a normal one instead and will add a full size non-slip mat. The only other point worthy of note is that the UFH manifold-and-gubbins are under the stairs, but that a lot of other gubbins is in the garage at the other end, so I am putting in a couple of runs of water pipe in case they are needed later. These will be sealed at the garage end. Look to your laurels, @Onoff, we'll be done in the time it takes you to choose loo rolls.

And so it begins ... the refurbishment of my downstairs bathroom to be a shower room. The self-builder who added an upstairs and extension to the bungalow got a few things wrong, and one of them was that he put a bathroom downstairs, and a shower room upstairs; exactly the wrounf way round for when a frail relative or disabled visitor needs to have downstairs facilities. So this summer both bathrooms are being overhauled - starting with the downstairs one this week. I was expecting a few things to emerge from the shadows, given that there have been a couple of idiosyncracies in the way elements of the house have been done. The downstairs bathroom has been gutted this morning, with FOUR surprises. Firstly, and I am probably unwise to admit not finding this in up to the last 5 years or so, it turns out that the plughole was not connected to the waste pipe .. or rather, became disconnected from the waste pipe at some point between 2009 and now. I moved in in 2012, and have never had reason to burrow under the bath. And I don't mean the overflow, I mean the plughole - where all the water exits. You could have blown me down with a bicycle pump on that one. It seems that originally it was not pushed on by the self-builder who did the house (treat self-builders like Mr Brezhnev - trust but verify !), in that the little flange around the male half had been treated as a "push pipe up against here" thing, rather than a "push pipe over this flange to make sure it grips properly and stays on" thing. Interesting. So the waste pipe was in mid-air below the plughole and a portion of the bathwater had been missing the entry to the pipe. The effect was a moist slab, but apparently no humongous harm has been done, other than a need to run my medium sized dehumidifier overnight. (The room dimensions are roughly 3m x 2m.) Photos: Damp patch in screed caused by plug-disconnection. And secondly, a huge crack in the sand-cement screed - caused we think by expansion-contraction as the ufh cycles. Fibres, Fibres, Fibres ! Davina the Dehumidifier doing her thing. Thirdly, for some reason the chap had painted the wall behind the bath with some kind of water-impervious gloop, which guarantees that the tiles were not very well attached as the strength is that of the weakest layer. And fourthly, there was an interesting recessed trench round the end of the screed, perhaps for pipe-tidy and "flat floor" reasons. And that photo shows a better view of that crack. I am now hoping that the already identified crack in the floor of the upstairs bathroom is in the screed not the subfloor, as that will perhaps save me hoicking out quite so many of the underlying layers. Come back tomorrow for the next enthralling episode of ... the Saga of Badezimmer Zwei. And - if you have not done so recently - check that your drainage pipe is properly attached.