Upstairs Bathroom Remodel

Hello everyone, how was your weekend?  Before I tell you about my bathroom, I wanted to say that I've started doing image descriptions in the photo captions so m blog is more accessible.  If there's anything I can do to make the blog more accessible, let me know.  I'm still at the awkward stage of doing image descriptions, so bear with me!  Anyway, on to the story....

There was a weird and mysterious leak in our kitchen wall when we moved in.  Grody!  We knew it was coming from the bathroom upstairs, but not from where.

The only good thing about it was that I wanted to redo the bathroom anyway because it had super cheap pale purple plastic wetwalls, the sink stand was chipped, the bathtub and sink plugs didn't work, the drains were disgusting, the finish on the taps was worn, the bathtub looked like someone had chibbed it several times with a screwdriver, the shower screen leaked, the floor was cheap vinyl stick-on tiles that scratched and dented easily, and the toilet was this weird short thing that didn't flush very well and splashed all over your butt when you pooped.

A bathroom with pale lavender shiny wetwall, a black and white checkered floor, a bath with an electric shower, a tiny white toilet, and a cheap white sink.  An access hatch is above the tub. There is a gap in the wetwall covering the side of the bathtub.

The same bathroom from a different angle, showing the slanting ceiling and velux window.

My flat is a late-Victorian tenement flat and I wanted a Victorian-inspired bathroom.  Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, has some impressive Victorian Toilets that you can visit and pee in for 40p, but their Visitor's Centre has Victorian toilets, too!  (And you can pee in them for free, but still -- if you ever find yourself in Rothesay, stump up the 40p and check out the Victorian Toilets, they are right on the pier!)

Original Victorian toilet with a dark wooden toilet seat in a tiled stall. Original Victorian sink in a tiled room.
A close-up of the greenish-taupe square wall tiles with a row of thin green textured decorative tile on top.

My joiner, who I had move the loft access hatch (see first photo) our of the bathroom and into the hall, said to check out Ware With All, a local bathroom supply store, and I'm so glad I did because they were a huge help.  (I'm very independent and opinionated and don't generally like help, but everyone I worked with there was a mine of knowledge and had really great ideas and suggestions.)

The new roof access hatch in the hallway.

Andrea and I bounced a bunch of ideas off of each other and came up with a good layout for the bathroom (it was her idea to move the sink to a different wall and we came up with the tall radiator idea together) and she picked out a great floor tile!  I had told her to talk to me about flooring and she was all, "I already picked out the floor tiles for you," and showed me these lovely tiles that look like distressed wood.  They look very realistic even up close (except for the grout between them, of course) and are exactly what I was looking for!  It saved me a load of time researching flooring and I like them so much, I'm going to use them when I redo my kitchen and the downstairs WC, too!

Gareth gave me some great advice on tiles.  I wanted the tiles to look like a wally close (that link will take you to an awesome pdf about wally closes), which, if you don't know what that means, is a fancy tiled shared stairwell in a tenement flat -- they were very popular in the late Victorian times and some of them had some really gorgeous art nouveau tube lines tiles.  I used Johnson Tiles in black, chartreuse, and white and Minton Hollins tiles for the decorative row.  I brought the sample book of Johnson Tiles home with me and really stressed out over which colour to use and whether to use metro tiles or the more traditional 150x150mm ones.  I was second-guessing my chartreuse decision until they actually arrived and it was the most stressful thing about the bathroom installation until the installer opened up the wall and found out what was really causing the grody leak into the kitchen:

Terrifying footage of lead soil pipes with huge cracks, both in the space behind my wall and sawn off and on the floor.

Cracked lead soil pipes coming from my toilet and from my neighbours' flat!  This was beyond my installer's capabilities, but luckily, an emergency plumber lives nearby and he came and did a great job of replacing the soil pipes.  He had to remove bricks from between our flats and even had to reach through the wall and replace my neighbours' soil pipe!

The space between the walls of my bathroom and my neighbour's bathroom, a maze of old dark lead pipes and on the right, the space where some of the brick wall was removed, before and after the grey plastic soil pipes were installed.

Another thing I really fussed over was the sink.  I was going to go with a metal sink stand, until I saw this lovely Edwardian chest of drawers for £35 at my local BHF Furniture and Electrical.  (I could do a whole post on the wonderful antique furniture I've bought from them!)  I ordered an Edwardian sink and a tap mixer with a high arch (because I like to wash my hair in the sink) and had the installer cut the chest of drawers to fit the sink.  (The drawers still work, too, I've just made them shorter to accommodate the sink and pipework.)

A large white Victorian-inspired sink with a fancy arching mixer tap sits atop a wooden Edwardian chest of drawers.  Hanging above the sink is a vertically aligned oval antique mirror.

Picking the tub was easy.  I wanted a clawfoot because I wanted a freestanding tub and clawfoots are easy to clean under.  My grandmother had a clawfoot and I thought it was so cool -- she painted the toenails with nail polish!  Hers was cast iron and although I'd love a cast iron tub, the stairs to my bathroom are really narrow and cast iron tubs weigh over 150kg (!!), so I went with an acrylic one (and it was still a struggle to get it up the stairs!).  Picking a toilet was easy, too.  We didn't have the ceiling height for a high level toilet, so I chose a low level one.

I wanted a bidet, but my husband REALLY didn't and pointed out that it could get messy (my kids can be a bit rowdy and they also have bedrooms upstairs while ours are downstairs), and I figured I could always use the shower mixer as an impromptu bidet if I really wanted to.

The whole thing took over two weeks and was rather stressful (my favourite neighbours let me shower at their place in the meantime -- how nice are they?!), but the end result is fabulous and I love taking baths so much, I haven't even made the custom shower rail yet, even though it's been nearly a year.  I don't miss showers at all (although if I did, I could, at worst, crouch in the tub and hose down under the fancy mixer!).

A white clawfoot tub with a shower mixer, a vertically aligned silver towel-warming radiator, and a white low-level Victorian-inspired toilet with a dark wooden lid.  The bottom half of the wall is chartreuse metro tiles with two stripes of black metro tiles along the bottom and a stripe of vintage-inspired decorative floral tiles along the top.

The vertical towel-warming radiator is plumbed right into the central heating.  And, like with my Secret Closet, I didn't let the old radiator go to waste.  I had it moved into my kids' "office", which, like the kitchen, for some reason didn't have a radiator in it.  So now all the rooms in my house are heated.

Exposed copper piping coming up from the floor into the wall.  The other side of the wall, showing the bathroom radiator, now hanging in the children's "office".

If you are wondering, my toilet, tub, sink, and both the sink and bath mixer were all new from Burlington, as they have affordable Victorian and Edwardian inspired ranges.  This is not a sponsored post and I'm not using affiliate links.  I just really like how everything turned out.  :)

I still need to remodel my kitchen and downstairs WC, so stay tuned!