It’s almost inconceivable to me, now, how we lived when we first bought this ‘wreck’. The makeshift bench below served as kitchen and bathroom, the tap on the wall bringing cold, unfiltered water straight from the well. We were living in the bus at the time, you can just see the door on the left. Washing was something done quickly… well, I’ll leave it to your imagination.
This was our composting toilet with a view. We found many such practical toilets like this when we were travelling around New Zealand. They were, amusingly, known as ‘long drops’. They are surprisingly civilised, and when peat (or woodchips in NZ) is thrown in, there is little or no odour to cope with.
The space below will eventually become a kitchen and foyer. The doorway to the right is the original external back door leading into the main room, which served as living area and kitchen. The corridor leads to a utility area, and the door in front of me is to the room intended as a bathroom, for which I picked up a second-hand door in a charity shop.
This is the first room in the extension to see a coat of render and plaster. Robin is being given some expert tuition from our neighbour, a builder, who stopped us from making quite a few gaffes on our renovation project. We always knew we were doing something wrong when he began with, ‘Well, I wouldn’t do it that way if I were you…’
Below, the room is rendered, and the ceiling and left wall, plastered.
Finally, the whole room being plastered, and floor tiles laid, we began to fit it out.
The wall tiles were a gift, not a choice, but we obtained a box of blue patterned tiles, and made the most of all of them. We were finally able to have the first shower for three years…. well, aside from visits to family. Absolute luxury! Kids these days take showers for granted, but certainly when I was young very few people had them, and when my mother was young (in Bristol) they didn’t even have a bathroom, just a scullery, and a toilet shared between several homes. Times have certainly changed.
We put in a radiator, which mostly served as a heat dump to stop the immersion tank from burning out when the Aga was lit in the main room, but even though the room was rarely warm when we needed it, it did help to stave off the mould. RED PAINT IN THE BATHROOM? My mother was aghast. But we had lived in fairly miserable, grey surroundings for quite a while by this time, so a vibrant and colourful space was mentally uplifting.
Our weekly spending routine was one of need rather than desire (can we afford a bag of cement as well as the blocks?), so when it came to requiring a towel rail, I made one from leftover bits of window sill. This will eventually be replaced by a heated towel rail, but for now it serves it purpose.
I then built cladding to cover the pipework, and a similar one around the bath.
An American author came to stay with us and, amusingly, I asked if he wanted to use the bathroom, meaning to wash and do teeth, etc, before retiring. He very politely replied that ‘he had already been, thank you.’ I had forgotten that although we (English) use the term literally, to mean the room in which the bath is situated, that is not the case in America!
And finally, we were able to put up a little bit of artwork we had bought in Nelson, New Zealand and which had remained packed – like a lot of our stuff – for several years. The fish is made from some kind of cast metal, with small pieces of paua shell (abalone) for the scales.
And a hint of the future… when the hallway was completed (2021), we put in a proper doorframe (the previous one was made of rough timber), and a nice new door.
A few years later, when the house had been insulated, roofed, and a heater inserted we repainted in a slightly gentler colour.
