In the communal fridge at work, there is an unopened bottle of milk with a "use by" date of 2 weeks ago. Attached to the bottle is a note "Sorry, one of my visitors used your milk by mistake so I replaced it".
What a kind caring place we work in.
It's just a pity that they didn't write which company's milk they were replacing. No one has dared to touch the new bottle in case it wasn't their milk.
It tickled me, that's all.
This afternoon, I spent a happy few hours cleaning a belfry. It's a very tiny tower, only about 3 or 4 square metres. There are four floors including the ground floor. I only managed to clean the ringing room (first floor) today, and a little bit of tidy up of the clock chamber (2nd floor). It was really quire filthy. I feel like I've vacuum cleaned away hundreds of years of cobwebs, sandstone dust and bees...
Most of the mess happened to be thousands upon thousands of dead bees. Apparently, some years they swarm into the top of the tower, live there for a bit then die during the winter. I'm not looking forward doing any maintenance in the bell chamber (top floor) during the summer.
So, now we have a belfry that people can go in without overalls. So, what's the next step? Ringable bells?
I've reported four (suspected) gas leaks in the road/pavement recently.
It's quite easy to report them (after you have plucked up the courage to ring the "Gas Emergency Services" on a number ending in 999). What if they weren't really gas leaks...I hope there's no such charge as "wasting gasboard's time".
Outside, gas disperses so easily that the smell is quite faint. I wasn't sure if the smell was gas, or just a pretty flower or exhaust fumes.
I saw that they did dig up the road in at least one of the places I reported it, but that's the only feedback I got. It would be nice if they would give me a ring or write to just say "you were right, they were really gas leaks, oh and thanks". The lack of response makes me wonder if my nose is imagining things.
All four leaks were in busy streets and must have been passed by thousands of people. I've been noticing a faint smell of gas for months myself before reporting it.
If the gas companies really do care about gas leaks, there are two simple things they could do:
This is of course in contrast to Yorkshire water who did phone me up after reporting a water leak to confirm that it was a leak and thank me for reporting it.
I have never tweeted, yet I have stacked up 40 followers. When you can't be bothered to even log in to block/delete the ones that are spam/pron ..it is time to close the account. I'm sure that the 37 won't miss me.
I log into facebook about once a month. I feel out of the loop.
I still use RSS lots; I keep up with some good blogs that way.
I might write here more frequently. A timely resolution.
Any the bathroom is about finished. Only the floor to tidy up and the hallway wall to fix.
As we prepare for an influx of relatives this weekend on account of a first birthday party, I've taken the drastic step of tidying away the tools, screws and general mess from the bathroom and hallway.
It's not that the work is finished (still....) but that it's harder to cover up for the fact in it's taking so long when the walk from the bedroom to the shower in the morning is a bit like playing Indiana Jones.
Anyway, we're nearly there. The remaining jobs are:
Have I forgotten anything?
I took the old bath to the tip today. It went into the landfill skip. I felt so guilty. I'd tried leaving on the drive (no one stole it, although they took the sink) and advertising on freecycle (no replies).
What else can you do with an old acrylic/fibreglass bath?
I didn't do any work on the bathroom tonight. Instead, I seem to be addicted to failblog.org. I sit here laughing at page after page of people getting things wrong in the stupidest ways possible.
I suppose the fact that I could be finished with this long overdue project in a few evenings, if only I could face getting the tile cutter out again to do that one last bit of tiling, is something of a FAIL.
Today was the first day of the year when I actually had to get up when it was still dark. On the upside, I suppose I'm making efficient use of the available daylight. But I didn't mind the darkness because I used the new shower for the first time!
Why wait so long after fitting it? Because there seems to be a shortage of shower curtain rails. Would you believe it!
I looked in B&Q - the only suitable one (i.e with brackets, rather then the weak-looking friction-fit job) was £60, which was more than I wanted to pay and it didn't look that good anyway because it looked like the curtain would fall off the hooks. I looked in Screwfix, they had exactly the same one as B&Q at £25. (Yes less than half the price - B&Q is so expensive for such things) but were out of stock. In fact they had no stock available for any that I liked. Even ebay had nothing, for once.
Finally I found one on the internet, which arrived yesterday and was fitted immediately.
Also last night, I tackled the problem in the sink. After being away for a couple of days on a trip, it was not a pleasant job. Wearing latex gloves I tackled the smelly mess.
The problem was of my own making (in two senses of the word). Having been bitten once trying to reuse an old waste trap, I made sure that I bought a new one for the sink. Knowing that space was tight, I bought a nice tidy compact trap.
However, last week, when fitting the front of the sink unit is on, it became clear that there would not be enough room even for this trap: the semi recessed sink sits so that the waste hole is so close to the front of the unit. So I tempted fate and put the old trap on the sink, which was a simple U-bend in the form of a P-trap.
Of course, it was a bad idea.
When I fitted it, it dripped slightly, so I ended up over tightening it onto the waste. This, in itself caused no problems, but when I want to remove it, of course it was stuck tight. Turning harder (which is pretty hard because you cannot really get a spanner to it once the sink is fitted into the unit) just managed to unseat the waste unit itself.
In fact, the trap was stuck so tight that I had to resort to a saw to remove it. 90 minutes later and I had the waste and trap out. 10 minutes after that I had the waste re-seated and sealed, and a new P-trap fitted.
With a sigh of relief, I soaked the few tools that I had used in bleach - I really don't want any chance of a repeat of the events of last weekend.
I learned two things over the weekend.
1. At 3am Sunday morning, I learned that the toilet is close enough to the sink to provide a possible solution to simultaneously dealing with both symptoms of Gastroenteritis.
2. At 3:15am Sunday morning, I learned that the possible solution above isn't actually a very good one.
The sink is now out of order.
Apart from the illness delaying work, it's quite a setback to the bathroom progress because it looks like I'll have to remove the sink again.
Well, the shower manufacturer don't really want to know that they've got the labels on the pipes wrong. They even suggested that it would be hard to prove that I hadn't swapped the labels round after. A very sympathetic guy from customer support suggested that I ask my customer if they would mind if I fit it upside down...I said that I don't think that the idea would go down well.
For reference, here is the unit with the stickers the wrong way round.
Midas 200 with wrong labels
I decided to tackle the problem from the hallway, rather than taking down any tiles.
Here is the quite neat "before" shot.
And here it is "after", not looking nearly so good.
Pipes the right way round.
The little U in the hot pipe is because the pipe is quite rigidly fixed at the bottom and I didn't want the expansion to stress the also-rigid, push-fit shower fitting. I'm not sure how effective it will be, but it's probably quite effective at reducing the flow rate in the shower.
Soldering those pipes was tricky: the plastic shower fitting is fixed to the wall (screwed from the front, under the tiles). The pipes are rigidly fixed somewhere (especially the hot). So you have to assemble the pipes and solder in-situ, it would be impossible to solder and then insert them into the shower fitting. It looks like I didn't melt the plastic, somehow.
And here's the end result - it actually works. If only I had a shower curtain....
Shower!
Incidentally, someone stole the old sink, radiator and a broken toastie machine from outside my house on Monday. Now all I need to do is get rid of the old bath.
You may recall the effort spent plumbing the shower fitting in the wall. You may also recall the effort tiling it. The finish is now complete, grouted and sealed. It looks great.
Unfortunately....well, see below.
From: Ian Broster
To: Aqualisa Technical Support
Date: Saturday 19 September 2009
I have just fitted a Midas 200 - but it
does not adjust temperature correctly.
I have double checked that the inlet pipes
match the makings on the tap (i.e. the left
one closest to the output pipe is cold).
Please can you confirm that the markings on
the shower unit are correct?
Regards
Ian
And the reply
From: Aqualisa Technical Support
To: Ian Broster
Date: Monday 21st September
Dear Ian Broster,
Thank you for your e-mail.
This does sound as though the stickers on
the valve may be on the wrong way around,
if you look at the front of the valve with
the outlet on the bottom left, the hot
connection should then enter in the rear
on the left as you look at it.
...
There have been so many opportunities to get this right! When I first did the plumbing, I noticed that the pipes were the other way round to the old shower, a different model from the same company. So, I did a quick check.
I searched in the documentation and installation guide for confirmation, but it only refers to the "markings" on the valve. It does not say which is the right way!
I even searched the internet to see if anyone else could confirm which way round, but I could not find anything relevant.
So, thinking 'how can anyone get two really important stickers the wrong way on a production line!' I went ahead. Damn.
So, in case any one else happens to have this shower, and are not sure which way round they go...then now you know.
With the cold weather approaching, there is a certain pressure to get the heated towel rail fitted. It's not that we need cosy warm towels that urgently, but that when I moved the radiator pipes, I didn't bother to refill the central heating system again, thinking that I'd save some time (and inhibitor solution) by leaving it turned off until the hot towel rail was properly fitted. This means that we have had no heating. During the summer months, of course, we didn't notice.
Anyway, after spending a long time drilling a few holes in the tiles (and probably ruining a nice masonry drill bit in the process - how can it take 10 minutes a hole to drill through 9mm of rather fragile ceramic?), we have a nice new heated towel rail (and a cosy warm house too).
I never thought I would liken drilling breeze block to drilling into soft cheese until I tried drilling through a breeze block wall with tiles in front of it; the contrast is spectacular. With some irony, the next day some new proper tile drill bits arrived for me in the post. I'm sure that they turn my tiles into cheese too.
It's been a long time since the last update. Since then I've been tiling. And that's about it. Tiling for weekends and every evening for over 2 weeks. I have fitted over 300kg of tiles to the walls (I really hope they're strong enough).
Perhaps I'm just not a fast tiler. Perhaps I can blame it on the huge tiles. Perhaps I can claim that I had to buy a few extra tools (which is certainly true).
In any case, I really have almost done tiling. It only remains to tile around the extractor fan (I'm waiting for a 110mm diamond hole saw to arrive) and a tiny bit of boxing to make and tile.
I've grumbled about large tiles but now that I'm at the end, it doesn't seem so bad. The large tiles generate quite a lot of wastage, however. There were 35kg of offcuts, 12%, counting only the bits that I bothered to save (the larger bits that might conceivably be used somewhere else).
I only broke one tile (actually, not broke it as much as somehow cutting it in mirror image).
The one upside of the large tiles is that the grouting was easy, completed in only a few hours. It's looking good. Finally. Pictures will come when the tiling no longer almost done.
Yes, the tiling is going very slowly. Did I mention how awkward it is to work with huge tiles?
I'm averaging about 5 tiles in an evening (3 hours) at the moment, mostly because each tile needs to be cut into so many pieces.
Anyway, here are some photos.
Around the bath
You'll notice around the bath, there is a row about 10cm high. This is perhaps unusual, the typical advice being to make the row above the bath just less than a full tile. Again, this a the problem of large tiles. It is important to get the border at the right height (not too close to the sill, not hitting the sink, etc.) and the large tiles don't leave much room for manoeuvre. There were no options that hit all requirements, but the best option was having a thin row above the bath.
Here's a bit of carefully constructed boxing that's about 70% of the size of the previous boxing but holds the same pipes.
Boxing
And finally, an example of an awkward tile, yet to do, that needs to be cut around the door.
Tiling Around the door.
Despite an appeal on facebook, I failed to find someone with a 110-120mm diamond hole saw to lend me so that I can cut the extractor fan vent. Although they're not expensive for a tool (about £10-£15), as I'm only going to drill one hole with it, it's an expensive hole! Once the rest of the bathroom is in a better state, I'm going try a tungsten carbide jigsaw blade instead.
I expected the tiling to go slow, and it is. I've only covered half of the bathroom after a full day at it.
One issue is the large tiles we chose. Almost every tile needs some unusual cut doing to it whereas with small tiles, most cuts are just straight breaks and any odd corner ones are fast to cut because they're small anyway.
I have had some successful tiling however. The holes for the shower outlet look good and it will be easy to get a watertight seal there.
Show outlet
The next issue will be tiling round the extractor fan. I feel the need for a new tool here.
Extractor fan
P.S I notice from the logs that there are quite a few people regularly reading this blog. I once tried to work out who was following it, feel free to add a comment from time to time, whoever you are.
There is visible progress today - I've started tiling! The end is in sight...
Wall tiles
Unfortunately, my tile cutter is too small for the big tiles we bought. After failing to hire one for a week because all(?) the hire shops in York are closed on Saturdays, I've ordered a new one from ebay at 1/3 of the price of B&Q.
Here are the nicely drilled floor tiles fitted. These hole cutters are brilliant.
Drilled Floor tiles
Finally, the sink didn't come with any clips to hold it to the worktop. I queried this with the supplier, who asked the manufacturer. Apparently the silicone sealant is meant to be enough to hold it in place. However, it's semi-recessed, so half of it overhangs the edge; if you fill it with water and lean on it, will it be secure? I don't believe it. So I'll have to be inventive and make some sort of clip....
Balancing act
And of course, the stupid bath waste is still leaking...I've added more silicone..again.
I didn't do much tonight in the bathroom: just primed the walls ready for tiling.
And re-sealed the bath waste again. If this doesn't work I will have to buy a new waste, this one is not appropriate since it requires a good seal against the underside of the bath, which is not smooth. It really is not a good thing to try and make a seal against a rough surface.
However, I did play with a new diamond hole saw with excellent results!
Round holes:
Yesterday, Robin commented that you can never get a spanner anywhere near the nuts under a bath once the bath has been "tiled in". This is true and is what I was thinking when I brought all the pipes out to the side of the bath within reach. If you want to change the taps, for example, at a later date, then the only awkward nuts to tighten are the back-plate nuts for the tap; all of the water pipe connections are either in reach, or can be done before putting the taps onto the bath.
Accessible Pipes:
I didn't write anything last night because it took too long to fit a new trap to the bath. You'd think that changing a trap would be easy. But of course not. Somehow, removing the old trap I must have pulled a bit too hard on the waste of the bath. When I fitted the new trap, the seal had gone.
So out came the bath completely so that I could remove the waste, clean up the silicone and reseal. On that note, the design of the bath waste is rubbish. It needs to make a seal against the bottom of the bath, which is a rough surface made of fibreglass. So the only way to get it watertight seems to be to use lots of silicone. And if that doesn't work, just repeat.
Anyway, after too long, we have a nice, small, watertight trap on the bath. If only I'd done that in the first place then I wouldn't have wasted an evening taking the bath out again.
Also, this one is a slimline one that doesn't need a hole in the floor to accommodate it. If only I'd done that in the first place then I wouldn't have had to cut a hole in the floor, which presumably is now a great place to have a leak.
New trap:
Today, however, was finally a productive evening!
I took the opportunity of the children being happily entertained to use the remaining daylight to cut the worktop for the sink. This was not as easy as you might imagine. Without instructions or a template, I guessed and marked and measured twice and marked and measured twice and marked and measured twice and still got it wrong. (But intentionally, it was the right way sort of wrong, so that was OK.)
So the sink is fitted and tested. It isn't, however, attached to anything except pipes. I can't see any easy way to attach it to anything; there were no clips, extra bits or even instructions.
And fitting the replacement loo that the nice people at Maddisons delivered was easy. It didn't leak...
So now it's functional. We have a working bath, toilet and sink.
Functional:
The main remaining jobs are basically (not necessarily in this order):
It might be finished by Christmas then.
This evening we prepared the walls for tiling - mostly removing old adhesive.
Actually Karen did most of that. I mostly did some thinking (and removing the toilet, which will be replaced tomorrow by the nice guys at the bathroom supplier). There are just lots of unknowns to think about.
At least I've decided on the height and drawn a nice horizontal line rather higher than I expected about half way up the wall.
It was a disappointing few hours this evening.
I thought I would assemble the sink/vanity unit. But...there's a cupboard missing and there's no point cutting the worktop to size until I know exactly how big the cupboard is.
Empty space:
I thought I would adjust the legs of the bath properly. But...the idea of reusing the old trap wasn't a good one, and it's leaking. So the bath needs to come out again.
Old trap:
I thought I would test to see if the toilet is still leaking. It is. Despite putting silicone around the gasket. After 20 minutes of prodding, poking, shining bright lights down the holes, I hit upon the idea of blowing down the screw hole to see if the water is actually entering the screw hole through an invisible fracture in the basin. The toilet is indeed faulty - water can get from the inlet to the bowl to the screw hole.
Leaky toilet:
I know that I could probably "fix it" by filling the screw hole with silicone when I put the screw in. Had the cupboard not been missing I probably would have done so. However, a general lack of progress tonight puts me in the mood to ask the supplier to replace it.
Finally, in an attempt to not have had a completely wasted night, I leveled the patch in the wall and attached the door (ready for a visitor tomorrow night who might value some privacy while she doesn't have a bath and doesn't use the toilet or sink.
Wall:
Door:
Today I had an extra pair of hands; in a few hours we had almost tiled the floor, almost patched the wall where the shower is to go and almost fitted the loo.
1. Almost fitted the loo: needs to be a few inches to the left, with a new waste pipe, but if only I could stop it dripping when it flushes! There's a gasket between the cistern and bowl that just doesn't hold the water back.
Perhaps I'm fitting it wrongly. The toilet comes with very brief fitting instructions. However, I was surprised to find that the toilet seat comes with a 36 page user guide.
2. Almost a floor: time to invest in some new tools. Perhaps a diamond hole saw?
3. Almost patched the wall: close, but not quite flat.
I also discovered that the bath waste leaks. It's not one of the connections that I made, but the pre-assembled connection from the overflow to the waste. Some silicone will help I hope.
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