theFIREstarter

Hi peeps!

I am now about three quarters of the way into my two weeks off to get the bathroom done. How far am I into the bathroom makeover!? Hmm… Tough one but I would say about half way. Nonetheless I am happy with progress.

Things have been slowed down quite a bit by various factors:

• Having to go to friends/family for showers every night (rather than working into the evening)
• Helping a friend move house on Monday and then helping her out again on two consecutive evenings sort other bits out
• A few other social things which took up other evenings

I think it’s fair to say that if I’d kept a completely free schedule and worked into the evenings where possible, then I’d be bang on target.

One thing I’ve learnt though is that things take so much longer than expected, and if you mess anything up it causes almost exponential time increases. One small example, I had heard that levelling the bath takes ages and is a right pain in the neck, so I was delighted when I pretty much nailed it first time with guessing the height of the legs, bar a few easy and small minor adjustments. So I took the bath back out to put a few of the fittings such as the taps and waste, and then put it back in to discover that the waste was scraping against the floor so the bath needed raising by about 1-2 cm! It then took a lot longer to re-level the bath this time round, typical! 🙂

What has changed since last time:

Basically, I put in the bath and shower valve, am very nearly done connecting the shower pipes up and TFS Senior helped me put in the shower pump. Cheers Dad! Oh and we got a plasterer in to plaster the walls and roof, that is one thing I’m not touching right now as I think his half a days work would have taken me about 3 days to get anywhere near as good!

If you want a prime example of the paradox of choice or options anxiety in action, then just go to B&Q and look at the Valspar range of paints. It’s great that they can mix up so many different colours right in front of you but having all of those options is a right head-f***! I was stood there staring at about 15 different cards in front of me at one point, like some sort of paint colour based magic trick weirdo!

Still left to do is (groan):

• Finish off shower piping
• Board up the stud wall
• Tile the walls next to the bath
• Paint the other walls (with Valspar) and ceiling (with white emulsion. Thank goodness that was an easy choice! 🙂 )
• Paint the wood panelling and install
• Lay the flooring
• Box off the pipes around the toilet and sink area
• Install the sink/vanity unit
• Install toilet
• Install new radiator

I think that’s it! I think it’s fair to say I’ll be working a few evenings and weekend days to finish this all off, but that’s not bother.

the budget

I am sure most here are interested to see what we’ve spent on this project so far, what with this being a personal finance website and all? Well here you go!

Click for full size image!

To explain the three columns with figures in, we have an estimated budget before anything was bought on the left hand side, then a more accurate “still left to buy” column which is labelled as “Cost estimated” in the middle, followed by an exact costs of items actually bought on the right. We add the sum the middle and right hand columns and add the totals to get the final estimated cost in the red highlighted box in the bottom right hand side.

As you can imagine at the start this figure was not very accurate but as we’ve bought more and more stuff it trends towards the final figure, so I think that around the £2,000 mark or just over looks about right for a final cost.

To put this into perspective, the amount we wanted to spend was around £2000, so it worked out pretty well. As you can see our original estimate was over at £2,397.92 (not sure where the 92p came from!? 🙂 ) so this was an overestimate but I’d always prefer to do that than be unrealistic and then be disappointed when you end up blowing your budget!

To be honest, we could have done it for a lot cheaper, for example if we were doing up a rental house I think you could easily shave £500 off of that, if not cut it in half. It’s our own bathroom though and as we’re saving a tonne of cash doing most of the DIY ourselves it was nice to not have to pinch the pennies on each individual item, although obviously we still shopped around to get the best deals we could on what we wanted!

To finish off here are a few pics of what progress has been made for your delight…

Shower pump!

Bath is in!

Nice work from the plasterer!

Smoooooooth ceiling!

Shower pipes and valve nearly finished! OK it’s not the straightest but surely that is what those flexible hoses are there for!? 🙂

Now that is what I call a hearty lunch after a good mornings graft! 🙂

Check out the driver for the house move! 🙂