How I Renovated The World's Tiniest Bathroom And Recycled The Bath For The Bees.
When I bought my old Victorian house renovation project I didn’t expect the smallest bathroom in the world would become the biggest problem in the universe. You see them all on the telly makeovers, so carefree and casually stating “we just put in a new suite and tiled a bit, plus we thought we’d add an en-suite to every room in the house. Got someone in, took twenty minutes. ‘Bout £300”.
It’s been two and a half years, two and a half grand and I still haven’t got a bath panel. That bloody bath. It’s caused more trouble and strife than anything else in the whole house renovation. You’re probably wondering what’s she on about? Why’s it turned into such a drama? Why not just get the hell on with it? Well I’m going to tell you.
The biggest issue with the house was the accumulation of decades of filth and the butchering it took in the 1980’s when the council gave people a grant to carry out home improvements. The cocktail of cowboy building and the occupants never cleaning for over thirty years left the house structurally sound, but too big a job for contractors to take on and make money out of, and uninhabitable for families to move into. Just my kind of project.
I moved straight in and started work immediately. I have lived in more dangerous situations, but I’m not going to lie, it was unnerving. My only support was a solitary spider in the bath who I called Wilson (the Coconut head in the film Cast Away with Tom Hanks) as it was my only friend and contact with any form of life. I bonded instantly with her, she brought me great comfort and I showered at a friends house for the first two nights, but after that I was in, alone, just me, my spider and my scraper.
As much as I needed her, I began to worry she was trapped in the bath and might starve to death if she couldn’t climb out by herself, so I improvised with what I had and built her a ladder with the Anaglypta I had been chiselling off the walls in every room in the house to help in her escape. I didn’t want her to go, but it reminded me of the time in Hong Kong when I crawled out of a bathroom window in a block of flats to freedom. Solidarity spider sister. I was genuinely heartbroken in the morning when she was gone, but happy for her and to have helped.
She’s gone
Plumbers turned up, late, or more often didn’t turn up. Ridiculous quotes, no replies, predictable sleaze and even one refreshingly new reply that he only fits bathrooms if it’s nice and clean made me consider living with the cracked, 80’s grey, shabby suite with the sliding toilet seat and embrace the thought that I was going to have to learn to love it. Couldn’t.
The Estate Agent I bought the house from recommended someone who was married to someone who worked in the office and as my only request was that I don’t feel violated in any way I booked him. He trashed my new stair carpet, flooded the bathroom, smashed through the kitchen ceiling I had spent two weeks plastering and painting to stop the water pouring through the light fitting, left the ceiling light hanging by it’s wires, the new gold taps wobbling off the end of the bath which would eventually stop drawing first cold, then hot water (back to filling the bath with a pan from the sink), didn’t fit the bath panel as agreed, used my best towels and bowls to collect the water pouring onto the kitchen floor, told me to wait a few hours before turning the electricity back on and asked for more money when he left, but apart from that he didn’t sexually harassed me, so I was delighted.
As well as the mess he created inside, he also left the old bath, bog and sink in the yard where it all sat like some depressing load of old shite in a scene from Shameless. I didn’t have my car George Michael yet so I couldn’t drag it through the house and try and get it into a skip at the tip and I couldn’t risk the thought of another random man coming through the house leaving even a whiff of testosterone, so I didn’t.
It was a job too far for a long time, I covered it up with a tarp and let it fill with water and sludge for a year, until spring came around for the second time and I couldn’t stand it any more. Inspired by the excitement of sunshine I managed to smash up the sink and secretly dispose of it bit by bit in the bin bags - a bit like when they shake tunnel diggings down their trousers in The Great Escape. I put the toilet in the big purple bin I never use and covered that with rustic screening, then wondered how I was going to chop up and bury the body of the bath under the concrete. Put the tarp back on it.
Looks nice
Summer came around. I’d been away and come back and woke up in detached but relaxed state of mind. It was the first real comfortably hot day of the year and I found myself sitting in a kimono in my new old terrace house back yard with an old bath in it in Liverpool and the geezer down the alley is playing The Best Of The Beatles and when he talks he sounds EXACTLY like John Lennon. I am having a cosmic existential time and space crisis. Where am I? When is this? How did I get here? Spookily, I was just remembering this morning I had this same crisis in Hong Kong when I thought I’d gotten trapped in my flat in 1974. I can’t keep up with myself. He’s singing along now and sounds more like Paul.
I don’t know if it was the sunshine, the birds, the bees or The Beatles, but I finally decided not to sling the bath into to landfill, but to recycle it and fill it with flowers. More George than John or Paul. I finished my bagel, slipped out of the kimono into something less Mrs Madrigal and set to work building a banqueting bath for the bees.
I’m afraid I pulled the plug on the wee wriggly critters that were living in the swamp that had built a universe for themselves in the bath while it sat stagnating, but I think they all found a better world down the drain at the end of the yard. I used the last of the bricks that the double glazing guys left when they put my french doors in to prop up one end of the bath so the water would drain freely out of the plug hole, adding some more inside for extra drainage.
A trip down to the garden centre was not without its challenges, gone are the days I can hump and hurl 50ltr bags of compost around, I felt bad about my trolley rage in the carpark after trying to get three bags out and in the boot, but I felt far more righteous when I realised I could recycle the plastic bags from the compost as well as the bath. Ooogh I could kiss my bees knees.
I used the last of the bricks to secure and hide the plastic lining and then decided on a yellow and blue planting scheme. I finally had a safe home for some blue delphiniums I had frozen, starved, battered and bruised for weeks, I bought two sea hollys, some variegated bugle, yellow scented freesias, scented stock, marigolds, trailing lobelia, golden daisy things the bees would love and some trailing ivy.
I shouldn’t have bothered because I also bought a blue salvia that grew so big it overshadowed and drowned everything else in there (sorry about the pun). Never mind, the bees bathed in it all summer. It’s late autumn now, it’s still blooming and they’re still drinking it up.
