Destruction in my own home—surrounded by rubble and a broken pink bathtub

the shower

the bath

the laundry

After five posts on the devastation in Syria, I figured it was time for a slightly cheerier item. I thought I could do this because negotiations today in relation to Syria indicate that the civil war might calm down. Fingers crossed for the days ahead.

What better relief than toilet humour, well at least toilet news?

Over the years of this blog, I’ve written a few pieces on far-flung toilets. You can’t travel the places we do without encountering some rather unsavoury and ramshackle toilets. One of my favourite (or maybe least favourite) recollections were on the boat from Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan and toilets that would make your hair curl!

That said, I never expected to call my own amenities ramshackle, but they’ve earned the title after being in service for almost 60 years.

The offending amenities involve the laundry and the kids’ bathroom and toilet. Aussie homes often have the toilet separate from the room housing the vanity, bathtub and shower. So that makes three rooms for us to address.

The shower has been leaking for several years and has made a mess of two walls—one in the corridor and one in a daughter’s bedroom. That didn’t matter so much after the kids moved out because the shower was rarely used.

The laundry tiles were very cooperative. They just fell off—long before we thought about renovating

But then, while we were on an extended overseas trip, someone staying in the house accidently left a bathroom tap running for part of an evening. The tap got turned off and the floor got mopped up, but no one thought to look inside the vanity. Several weeks later, when we returned home, all I could smell was mould.

The inside of the vanity still had pools of water and both shelves and all three drawers were home to a mould farm.

I scrubbed and scrubbed, but could never get rid of the discolouration or the smell. It’s too late to suggest ways to tackle the problem—the vanity is long gone. But go ahead and offer advice if you think it might help someone else.

And then there were the tiles. It was quite startling when, in the middle of the night, the tiles on the laundry walls started falling off.

Of course these are first world problems, and if I was in wilds of Africa or Central Asia I’d probably start peeing under the lemon tree in the backyard and showering with the hose.

But the kids still come home for visits and guests come to stay, and I desperately wanted to get all the crap on the laundry floor up and out of the way.

Cory jackhammers the toilet wall

Graham tackles the pink bath

Time to renovate

So I informed Poor John that the time for renovations had come and he knew better than to argue. It’s summer in Australia and we were going to be home long enough for the work to get done.

Of course the first challenge was to find someone to do the work. I hopped on Google and searched for +Canberra +bathroom +renovations +reviews. Plenty of results came up, with almost equal shares of whingeing (complaining) and praise.

Most of the praise was for one-off operations—namely someone did a single successful job (or maybe more that weren’t commented on). But I couldn’t find any trace of these people online or in the whitepages. But ‘Ziggy and the boys” came up many times in positive reviews between 2011 and 2015.

Good grief, we know Ziggy! Why didn’t I think of Ziggy? We’d done business with Ziggy in 2000, when we did renovations for Aunt Esther’s flat and an extension at the beach house.

So we headed out to his place AND he remembered us.

With a no-nonsense approach, Ziggy showed me which tiles I ought to have. I started to resist but couldn’t find anything I liked more, so had to admit his choice was perfect.

Then this was where ‘the boys’ came in. Ziggy only does tiling, but his network includes ‘the boys’ who do the structural stuff.

So now the boys—Graham and Cory—are busy destroying my laundry, toilet and bathroom.

The backyard and a kid’s bedroom is full of the stuff dragged out of the three rooms. The garage is full of several thousand dollars worth of new cupboards, tiles, and vanity and sink, as well as the laundry fridge and washing machine.

And with all that precious stuff in there and ‘exposed’ to the outside world, the garage door stopped working today. Luckily it’s stuck open. Even better, the repairman comes Monday.

The saga continues, so stay tuned.

More coming on Syria too.

Fish on holiday in our ancient pink bathtub

P.S. The new bathroom won’t have a bathtub. The current pink one is never used and the interior designer said the lack of a tub is not a deal breaker for a house sale. Whew! Gives us great new space in the renovated bathroom.

That said, the pink tub was a very popular item with our daughters and their friends who stayed overnight. When I told them the bathroom was being renovated they all said, ‘Oh no, what’s happening to the pink tub?’ They loved the memories of it, but nobody wanted it. I offered. Besides Graham and Cory reckoned it weighed about 90 kilograms and had to break it into small pieces to get it out.

By the way, the tub was last used in 2008 when the backyard pond sprung a leak, and the fish and plants had to live inside for 10 days while Poor John resealed the pond and waited for the work to dry.

The fish and plants loved the bath