The bathrooms in this house are right state! There are altogether too many of them for a start - four bedrooms, four bedrooms. Why why why?
The girls bedrooms and en-suites are like mirror images which is nice. Unfortunately one of their toilets had a poo in it when we viewed the house that was still there 6 months later when we moved in. That bathroom needs replacing entirely as the toilet wasn't plumbed in properly, the shower is really old and not thermostatic and the whole thing smells generally damp and awful. The other en-suite isn't so bad but the shower seems to leak so although we'd like to just spruce it up a bit ultimately it will have to come out as well.
Our en-suite and the main bathroom are something of a combined headache. We assume that at some point a huge slice of the main bathroom was stolen to make the en-suite and the result is a tiny bathroom that's really far too small for the size of the house. If it wasn't our en-suite we'd just get rid of it and turn it back into one big bathroom but of the three it's the only one that we logically should keep.
We've talked a lot about the idea of putting them together as a jack & jill bathroom which would work well for our family but we're not sure if would seem a bit weird for future people when we eventually try to sell. Or we could just keep it small but try to improve the layout, but unless we managed to make it perfect that could also put future buyers off, because it's tiny. It's a conundrum and no mistake.
I'll add some photos at some point.
2025 Update:
Problem solved! I actually can't believe it but we have now replaced all the bathrooms and can put four big ticks off the list. Phew.
Didn't think for a minute it would happen like this but we've ended up doing all four in a year.
First was Isabel's ensuite, which we reluctantly decided to have a go at ourselves. Ash doesn't like plumbing, but after quotes came in at something like £6000 just for one small ensuite we realised we probably didn't have a choice. It turned into a bit of a triumph, so much so that he decided to then bash out Thea's as well. And that's been a triumph too.
The catalyst for the ensuites getting done was that we knew we were going to lose both our ensuite and the main bathroom when we had the chimney breast removed, so we needed to know we'd have at least one functioning bathroom. Good job really because we have now been without them for 6 months and counting.
The main bathroom has been epic. After trying out lots of designs we decided to go the jack and jill route after all and bash down the wall between the old bathroom and out ensuite to make one decent sized bathroom. The old bathroom was just so small and there was no way to make a new one anything more than mediocre.
First of all the floor was super duper wonky, which we knew, but having to level the two rooms into one flat floor was a challenge for the builders. Then they discovered that the window did not have proper support above it and that the whole weight of the roof at that corner of the house was basically coming down on nothing. This in fact probably finally explains the mystery of why the back wall of the house leans, and the floors tip, as the purlin had pushed outwards.
Ash and I are not very good at interior design decisions and we must have looked at every tile in Manchester, the internet and the world and lost all of our will to live by the time we stumbled upon Mandarin Stone, which had a very nice showroom and we finally managed to pick some very nice tiles. It was soul destroying and I wis never to have to choose another tile so long as I live.
But then we had to choose lights!