Day: May 9, 2021

When I first moved into my current house nine years ago in 2012 there was an awful pong in my bathroom and when I exposed the pipework by breaking away the boxing around them at the foot of the wall, I found out what the reason was. A joint in the plastic waste pipe had not been made correctly and had been leaking for years but as I needed to put in an electric water heater (what is referred to over here as a ‘ballon’) and make connections for my washing machine’s water supply and waste, it was a simple matter to do the repair of the waste pipe at the same time.

And that’s how my bathroom has remained ever since – with the pipework exposed and the bottom of the wall broken away to get at them. So it’s a bit ironic that after all this time I’m now doing the making good that will end up making my bathroom look quite presentable again, work from which I will derive little benefit as I’ll be moving out in the not-too-distant future and from which my buyers will get the main use and enjoyment.

But that’s viewing things with the benefit of hindsight. My intention was to do the boxing-in of the pipework and the making good after I’d installed the new double-glazed windows in the bathroom and, of course, I bought the windows before I knew that I’d be moving, as I did also the new patio door. But having told the buyers that I would finish installing the new patio door, put the new windows in in the bathroom and do the making good, now I’ve got to stand by my word and do it.

I started on the bathroom work yesterday and made good progress before eventually running out of plywood. This morning from 10.30 am was my friend Victor’s birthday celebration and as Brico Depot opens on Sundays only from 08.00 am to 01.00 pm, I had to make an early start to get over there and back in time for the festivities. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to do any work in the bathroom at all today.

I wasn’t able to get cracking until after lunch so it wasn’t until this evening that I was finally able to finish up and call it a day. Boxing-in pipework can be a fiddly, tedious job as it has to be done accurately and this is very difficult in a house like mine in which nothing’s vertical and there are no right-angles. So although I was feeling very tired at the end of it, I was very pleased with the results.

Now there’s just the final cosmetic making good and painting to do. I’ll be able to combine the latter with doing the walls either side of the patio door so hopefully if things run smoothly, I’ll only need another couple of days or so to get both jobs buttoned up. Then only the new bedroom windows will be left to do but I have no intention of tempting fate at this stage by saying how soon I think they will be in, bringing to an end all of the ‘building’ work that I said I’d do

The weather has taken a turn for the worse now (as I was typing this earlier, rain was pounding against the new patio door) and it will remain bad for the whole of the coming week. With a bit of luck that means that I’ll be able to spend some time on ‘moving out’ stuff. I’d like to think that I might be able to get some packing started of stuff that I don’t have an immediate need for and I have to start thinking about clearing out the stuff that I’ve put in my ‘grenier’ upstairs as well as what was left by the previous occupier. I’ll have to see how things pan out.