The delights of renovation.....................

[Jeremy Harris]

As some know, I've been pre-occupied this week tarting up the only room in our current house (which is shortly going on the market), that I've not decorated or renovated, the downstairs loo.  It's always been grim, but it works and we've just got used to it, so have never done anything about it.  It's green.  In fact everything in it is green, except the ceiling.  Green tiles from floor to ceiling on all the walls, green WC and cistern, green wash basin, green vinyl flooring, even a bonded to the wall green ceramic toilet roll holder.  It even had a green loo seat until we changed it.  We had a minor disaster a couple of weeks ago, when a load of tiles fell off one wall, it turned out they had been stuck on to an emulsion painted wall...................

This meant I had to do something with it, as there was a right old mess left and there seemed no point in trying to patch it up.  The decision was made to buy a cheap white fitted WC unit, back to wall pan and a very narrow white basin unit, with a slim white ceramic basin on top (it had to be slim, as this loo is so small it wouldn't come close to passing current building regs).  This is what it looked like when I'd picked up all the loose tiles and made a start on the wall behind the door:

Lovely, isn't it?  That's the main stopcock on the floor at the right, with a stub of black alkathene pipe coming up through the slab and a lovely neat coil of earth bonding wire clamped to it.  I think the green colour of the WC, basin and tiles is probably "sage green" or something similar.  I've always thought it was hideous, but clearly someone went to a lot of trouble to get the same shades of green everywhere.  It's undoubtedly original, from 1982/3 when the house was built, although why on earth they painted the walls and then stuck tiles on them is beyond me.  AFAICS, there is only just a thin mist coat of emulsion on the walls, too, and the paint on the skirtings was applied after the tiles were put on, as the top of the skirting is bare wood when the tiles are removed.

We've lived in this house for a few years now, even though it was only ever supposed to be temporary, until we found the house we really wanted, as we had to move in a hurry.  When the government compulsorily move you around the country (as they do when you get to a certain level) they give you a "generous" five days to find a new house -any longer and they don't pay your removal expenses and legal fees. 

I've learned over the time we've lived here that the joker that built it had some unusual building practices.  For example, when we came to replace the doors and windows, we found that the thin plywood external soffits extended over the top of all the windows and were plastered inside as the top of the window reveals.  Another surprise came when I re-did the bathroom shortly after we moved in (that was also floor to ceiling green, like the loo).  The loo wasn't screwed to the floor.  The screw holes were filled with something like mortar, which I thought at first was just covering the screw heads.  It wasn't and so after an hour or so of trying to work out how it was fixed down to the concrete floor, I just smashed it up with a lump hammer.  What I found was that the loo had been fixed to the floor with a large lump of concrete.

Knowing this, when I came to remove the other loo I had a feeling that it might well be fixed the same way (it was the same colour, so I think was fitted when the house was built, like the one in the bathroom).  Knowing this, I decided to just run a masonry drill down the fixing screw holes, and lo and behold there were no screws,  So I drilled both out as deeply as I could, to reduce any key to what I was sure would lie underneath, another girt great lump of concrete.  I didn't want to smash the loo, as it makes a hell of a mess to clear up, so decided to gently tap around the base with a bolster and lump hammer.  To my surprise, after a few minutes the whole thing lifted clear, leaving this delightful lump of concrete stuck to the concrete floor:

The next job is to chisel this off the floor, then remove the stuck-down vinyl flooring and crack on with getting the floor tiled, so that I can fit the new loo and washbasin units, with a new stop cock inside the wash basin cabinet and new wall covering.  Because this is a budget job, the walls have had the tiles removed, been belt sanded to get them roughly smooth and are being covered with PVC wall panels, in a sort of cream colour.  Much cheaper than tiling, and much quicker, and I reckon it will tidy it up enough to sell.

I do just love the "lump of concrete to fix the loo" idea.  I think I've replaced around 8 or 9 WC pans over the years, and have never yet seen one fixed down like this, yet for this builder/plumber (a local firm, still in business) it seems to have been his normal method.

[Nickfromwales]

That's 100% a common method of fixing down pans, yesteryear. I've seen hundreds like that. One of the main reasons was the porcelain / China was ever cast very well and changed shape a fair bit when fired. That meant that when you sat the pan on the floor it was either not level or rocked on the high points. 

The solution was to make a tower out of compo and twist the pan down into it before it actually made contact with the floor, and leave it to set. You can't argue that it worked a treat, and would have still been there in 20 years time. 

That colour may put you of mushy peas for life

[Jeremy Harris]

Oh it was definitely rock solid and not going anywhere!

It is a bastard of a job to change the pan, though.  That vinyl is glued down with something like Evostik, and whoever did it did a cracking job.  I've spent two whole hours  with a pot of MEK trying to prise the stuff off by running the solvent underneath it to soften the glue.  I tried heat from a heat gun, but that didn't have any effect at all.  A scraper and patience with dribbling solvent to dissolve the glue seems the only way to get the stuff off.  I ended up having to go out for fresh air after an hour of this, as the fumes were that bad.

Next job is to get out the big 9" Makita angle grinder and see if I can grind some slots in that lump and try and chisel it off.  I was hoping to get the floor cleaned up and tiled by tonight, so I could make a start on fitting the new loo and basin tomorrow, but I can't see me doing any tiling today - it'll probably take another hour just to get rid of that lump of concrete off the floor...................