On Saturday I took a trailerful of stuff to the HWRC (the dump) and, brandishing my permit booklet, got in this time.

Top tip for the next person pulling down their bathroom: Tiles count as rubble but plasterboard counts as plasterboard. So you really want to get the tiles off the wall before pulling it down, because trying to separate the buggers while leaning over the side of a trailer is soul-crushing stuff. Dogged perseverence and the loan of a shovel from a nice man at the tip, I mean HWRC, got me a mostly-clear trailer and a return home in jubilant mood.

I drilled a couple of holes in the bottom of the trailer for drainage, having had to deal with waterlogged plaster and rotted wood for the bottom half-inch of the job. I then set about figuring out how to fit the problematic flush-fit bath/shower diverter into wall 1. This meant getting to play for the first time with my router, bought through the bosch staff discount scheme. I came out of the experience a little deaf but with all my fingers intact and a custom wooden bracket for fitting the diverter! Yay!

After a break I faced up to the fact that wall 1 will need its studwork modifying, and took the plasterboard off that wall. Top tip #2: when removing plasterboard, look for where it’s nailed and jemmy it off there. Then it comes off in large flat pieces will a minimum of dust compared to the hammer and bolster method, which manufactures dust with a by-product of small pieces of plasterboard.

That evening I planned to get a pizza and watch a movie but a txt saw me wending to Leeds for a late night salsa session, with the upshot that Sunday was a low-energy day.  I did though manage to make a scale drawing of the modified studwork, so that’s going to be all go once I have a level for the floor.

So really I need to be at the point where I’m choosing the floor tiles. That will set the height of the bath panel which sets the height of the bath which sets the extent of the wallboard (I’m fitting the bath direct to the studwork and overlapping the drywall and tiles to provide a good seal, and want to fit horizontal noggins at the right height to screw the drywall into so I’m not really happy to just leave “a few mm” for floor tiles).

Hmm, reading that back, it looks like I have decided that I’m having floor tiles. So that means I’ll need to lift and reinforce the floor then…