The aroma assaulted me first. Walking into our new flat’s bathroom was always going to be slightly different from the other rooms. You don’t exactly spend long periods of time scrutinising bathrooms during viewings – you kind of just try and look interested whilst wondering why anyone would own a bath with built-in cormorants.
But as I opened the door properly, shoved the key we no longer needed into my pocket and took a good, deep breath, I knew this was going to need some work. Tub graced with ceramic ducks aside (what on earth were people thinking in the 80s? ), the overriding smell was what can only be described as ‘bathroom’. You know the one; it’s that mildew-y scent that comes from a room that hasn’t seen soap other than washing-up kind since 1987.
Never a good sign. My immediate response –and one which would be entirely typical for me – was chuck the lot and start again.
Truth is, I probably would’ve gone full Winston Churchill (on the kitchen sink, apparently his mantra was ‘we shall paint, and we shall paint again’) if my girlfriend hadn’t intervened with some common sense. “Okay, Marcus,” she said patiently as I started pulling stuff out, giving me one of those looks, “what’s your actual budget for this?
The idealistic ‘teacher on summer hols’ budget, and the realistic ‘how much do you have?’ budget?” Ouch. Yeah, fair point. School teaching salaries aren’t exactly overflowing with spare cash for splashy renovations… Which was enough for me to stop, take a breath, and actually sit down and plan.
Right now I was scrolling around Instagram soaking up inspiration and sending Martha links to EVERYTHING LIKE OMG PERFECT, but that wasn’t going to help me budget or work out what we could realistically achieve (and by when). I grabbed a notebook –yeah, an actual notebook, not phone – and sat down to plan out what would become my Bible for the next… oh… six months. Lesson number one.
Always distinguish between wants and needs. I sound like such a bore talking about wants vs needs but when you’ve got a bathroom that’s so far on the needs side it’s actually unsafe to use, you start to lose perspective on what falls into which category. The shower was leaking behind the tiles, which we didn’t discover until water started leaking through into the kitchen ceiling below – wonderful.
The toilet was so loose it rocked whenever you sat down, which means it also kind of wets itself so panic if you’re ever sat on it for a long time. And the medicine cabinet was hanging on for dear life with the door hanging off at what I can only describe as a Tim Rookeesque angle. All of the above went into Priority One – things that had either broken or were actively threatening to cause damage to the rest of the flat.
Wishlist features – rainfall showerheads, heated towel rails, comeback kid metro tiles – got relegated to a Much Later Phase. I worked out roughly how much everything would cost and nearly choked on my tea. Minimum of £800 just for the plumber to sort out our never-ending list of issues, new bathroom suite would be at least £600/likely to hit £1500 depending on how extravagant we felt, tiling and labour £1200+, paint, accessories new toilet roll holder to make us feel like we weren’t living in John Major’s failed dreams another £400.
So around £3000-4000… just swum through in my head mathsematically – and I’d budgeted about £2500. Balls. I may have left teaching, but even I know you can’t do that to a spreadsheet.
Enter phased renovation. Oh god, how I love thee. Basically, the idea that you don’t have to renovate everything in one go.
Mind= blown. Rather than risking our sanity – and entire life savings – on fixing the entire bathroom in one go, we could spread it out over six months or so. Phase One would be jobs that actually needed doing – leaky pipes, dodgy toilet etc.
Basically just jobs that impacted the bathroom’s ability to work, basically. Phase Two would be jobs that would make it pretty, paint tiles fixtures and fittings etc. And then Phase Three would be when we gotya know, fancier.
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I made a giant timeline chart and slapped it on the fridge like a bloody Advent calendar. January was getting quotes/sorting out exactly what we wanted done (don’t say ‘we’ll decide when we get there’ after learning lessons from bedroom renovations – it will cost you) February was ordering things with long lead times – everyone wants to renovate their bathroom it seems – and March would actually be starting work. Left a few weeks between phases for us to recuperate too.
Teaching Year 9 about glacial formation is hard enough without stepping in dodgy plumber juice every five seconds. Speaking of spreadsheets, I made mine my new best friend. Decided to give everything three prices; budget; middle option; dream.
Vanity unit? Ikea unit I could practically build myself at £150; mid-range grown up option from B&Q at £400; dream slate-esque solid wood job that made me weep a little at £800. Pretty much everything fell into middle ground but gave us room for budgets saves and allowed us to splash out slightly on a couple of things that mattered.
I also started thinking seriously about what would actually improve our day-to-day lives vs looking good on Pinterest. Underfloor heating? Yeah, nice.
But if the bathroom doesn’t actually do its bathroom job first then it didn’t matter how gorgeous those tiles were. Heated towel rail though? Made the cut for phase two.
October in a cold, damp bathroom sucks and it’s not actually ‘nice-to-have’ when you’ve got to stand around getting ready for work in the morning and everything feels cold. Also factored in extra time and cost – like 10% more on both. Wasn’t fun to take off but I about died without it when the tiles we’d ordered came in the wrong colour and back they had to go.
Same when we started work and discovered the floor needed a lot more done to it than we thought. Of course it did. It’s a Victorian conversion.
Of course, the plan changed as we went along. Hell, the whole thing changed as we went along. But having a rough-ish idea at the start meant we could justify changes instead of panicked decisions.
That dream geometric tile I fell in love with online was FAR too busy for the small space when we saw it IRL. Rainfall shower head looked great but we have ZERO water pressure, so pointless.
Floating vanity looked amazing but was totally impractical with where our pipes were situated.
But having a plan to deviate from made those changes feel like considered choices rather than freaking out because something didn’t go to plan. Also help massively kept us on track of what we actually needed vs what would be nice to have when making tough decisions. Feel like it kept us sane too.
Weird how something as simple as a spreadsheet can do that. So yeah, looking back now (we’re about eight months in if you’ve forgotten) I’m bloody proud of us. Not just the finished product (because honestly it looks amazing and I actually feel nice spending time in there now) but how we went about it too.
Even our morning routines have changed. For the better. Anyone thinking of doing anything like this?
Make a plan, it helps. Plans are good.
