The perils of going to the toilet at night....

The previous blog told how we were creating a second B&B room by merging a couple of rooms, both of which were in a poor state of repair.

Running alongside this work we are also tackling three other issues, firstly we have had to raise the height of a section of the landing.This is because approximately 1' outside our bedroom door the landing has an unexpected step down, which is even more unexpected when getting up at 2am in a groggy sleepy haze to go for a wiz. The danger is further enhanced by the fact that the direction you tend to fall is towards the top of the precipitous staircase with nothing to stop you tumbling down the flight in true Eddie The Eagle style.














There was further disorientation at the stairs edge because the previous owner had strategically hung a full length curtain right on the edge completely hiding the fact that you were falling towards imminent death. Since we were also about to re-position the new guest room's door on the edge too we felt (after getting the Building Regs. office agreement) that we should level this anomaly.



Secondly we needed a new bathroom as we had sacrificed ours nearly 2 years ago to allow the first B&B room to be en-suite. This was an inconvenience (if you pardon the pun) but if we were serious about making this new venture work it was a sacrifice that we had to make. So we would take our showers or baths between bookings in either the B&B or the Holiday cottage's showers. When we had guests our loo was the downstairs cloakroom's. Of course the whole affair at the top of the stairs just made for an added adrenalin rush when going in the middle of the night and over the last few years we can only thank God that neither of us ended up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, which was even more probable as the cat has sometimes taken to sitting on the last step just to present us with one more challenge!

However Phase 3 was now upon us and the grand design was to allow for a new bathroom to be created on the landing by stealing a little bit of space from one of the smaller bedrooms... Hooorraaaaa!

To achieve this we would push this wall back to the first black beam in the ceiling making the door thinner and the wall slightly longer.  Then that extra space could be used to facilitate space for a reasonably sized shower (see the plans on the previous blog).





This next picture shows the remainder of the landing seen from the opposite direction and we would then build a new wall, utilising an existing door from the old Study. The wall would run from the left side of the door in the picture creating a long thin corridor this side and enough space to allow for a toilet and a sink within the new room. We both felt that after 2 years we deserved to treat ourselves to a bathroom of our own.. Lets call it a Christmas present to ourselves, ahhh how the other half live eh?

Once again all of this would require a huge amount of work from our builder, plumber and electrician, oh and decorating by us too.
I had to plan where every fitting, fixing and waste pipe would run to allow for this plan to work. We also sought advice from the Building Regulations officers.
The soil pipe for this room would be fairly straight forward as it could just poke through the exterior wall and drop down to a nearby sewer pipe (although a new route to a man hole would need to be dug out).
The main issues here are the facts that the exterior wall is over 15 inches thick and made of flint. Also the patio has been laid on a solid concrete bed some 8 inches thick! You could park a bloody tank on it.



However the en-suite soil pipe is a whole different problem as the room lays dead centre of the house. My cunning plan here is to drop it under the floor and through a wall which would bring it out into the corner of the downstairs cloakroom where it could join up with that toilets waste pipe. This seemed a good idea (and in truth it was the only logical solution) but it would entail the builder removing the downstairs toilet, digging up the cloakroom's floor and laying a new soil pipe junction beneath it.

This picture shows how much floor had to be torn up in the cloakroom. The toilet removed and the new pipe connection set in the corner to receive the loo poo from the en-suite above.

Once again there was a thick concrete floor which was a shame because it had been laid directly on top of some nice clay tiles as this photo shows.

Although directly underneath that was clay soil and the concrete was laid, probably out of necessity, with a plastic sheet damp course. The hole in the wall is caused by the damp clay's, rising damp.


The dining room is likely to be of similar construction and on a humid day last summer the coldness of the underlying soil caused the tiled floor to be really cool which then formed condensation to cover the whole floor. It was really strange to see this film of moisture appear and when you mopped it up it just magically re-appeared. Fortunately this has only happened the once.


So that was the story of what we had planned for Phase 3 of The Old Bakery's renovations. The next few blogs will talk of the trial and tribulations in putting the supposed perfect plan into place. It is a story of blood, sweat, tears, some cursing.... no, a lot of cursing and near the conclusion possibly, yes just possibly some tethers being found to be nearing their ends!


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