Ladies of Bath

The bathroom now has a bath! It is a revelation.

And you know what, it went in amazingly easily, thanks to having measured it a dozen times to get it to fit.

What I didn’t get right was the tile for the spout. Now, drilling holes in tiles is notoriously difficult, especially when you decided to do it by hand.

Manual circular tile cutter: just turn the handle

However the only circular tile cutter I have is a good old fashioned manual ‘turn the handle’ one, and it slowly – oh so slowly – grinds away at the tile until it eventually wears away the tile, over the aeons of time.

It’s rather like one of those torture devices they had in Victorian prisons, where the sole aim was to wear down the prisoner. But it’s not the despair I can’t stand – its the hope. The hope I might finally finish this blasted bathroom.

Alas it’s not that accurate, so when after – count ‘em – two hours of going round and round in circles, the hole proves to be too large for the spot. Horror of horrors: it might actually show.

 So, back to the drawing board. Or rather, the tile cutter.

Sex & the single gin – The Chav Tavern

Tlleing Tileing Tileing. Is there no end to the land of Tiles?

It’s not as if they are particularly big or complicated to put on the wall. Not the problem is that the walls are wonky, and each tile has to be exactly right in three dimensions, as opposed to the usual two.

Ettamogah Pub, Sydney

Looking back on the walls I’ve previously done, it’s clear that I’m getting better as I go on, even if it is sending me demented.

However this weekend I turned the corner – as it were – and managed to get most of the tiles in for where the bath is going to be, and then made it to the pub for a well earned pint.

Except pubs don’t really do the hills district. There is no cute looking local. Instead, there is just the regular Bull and Bush – or the Chav Tavern, also known as the Etimorgorrah tavern. It’s a classic Australian pub, by which I mean a huge beer bar of a place, selling overpriced burgers, and reaping profits from the pokies.

In most countries morning is what you go into when the beer runs out. In the Australian suburbs, it seems to be state of mind. I’m in mourning for that most rare of things in Australia - a British Pub.

On the busses

Midsummer. Which means – in a normal year – it would be sweltering outside, and far too hot to consider walking into the bathroom. Which of course, not only has no air-con, but also no insulation. However this summer is one of the coolest on record, and wettest too.

Just look at the grass! Its green. At the well! It’s higher than it’s ever been before.

Even the busses are almost tolerable, if you can put up with Hillsbus drivers and their manic driving, plus the way they turn the radio on really loudly to wake everyone up.

Incidentally, I have often wondered when in a muse, why those waiting for a Hills bus outside the QVB in the centre of Sydney queue in a straight line, and then file in an orderly fashion onto the bus when it arrives, while on the opposite side of George Street, those waiting for an STA bus can only be described as a loose rabble, which transforms into a stampede of crazed wildebeest when the bus finally arrives. Is there some unspoken rule whilst waiting for a Hills bus, or are their customers simply more refined?

Is this crazed wildebeest phenomenon gnus to you?

The Little Rince (when a small wash is good enough)

The vanity unit has arrived! And what a miserable job the renovation boys have done of putting it together. Covered in filth, from the taped up box it looks as if someone has opened it, and returned it, and they just sent it to us.

Greasy fingerprints galore, stains on the top, and even the sink hasn’t been glued properly to the underside of the unit, so water just slops out over the rim of the very small basin and into the vanity.

It also weighs a ton, and is designed not to have any legs, but just to ‘float’ on the wall, looking as if it’s hovering there, and not screwed in by the four hefty bolts I’ve put in the wall, with a good wooden beam for it to sit on too. There could be an earthquake, and the only thing standing would be the vanity.

However, I’ve yet again had to curse both the tiles and Aldi. The tiles for the bathroom were fired at an amazing high temperature, so the aren’t so much glazed, and a solid lump of rock. After trying to drill into them on several occasions, I now don’t bother, and cut them with a diamond saw. That, however, is no good for bolts. So I got out my nice set of new drills for Aldi, and proceeded to ruin a number of them. When drill and tile meet, what comes of worst is always the drill. In one case, it ended up red hot, dripping steel, with nary a dent in the tile.

Time for some new drills.

Grotte on the landscape

Ah, the joy of living in the age of internet shopping.

It means you can buy anything, and only pay what the locals are paying.

Which is a damn good job too, considering that most building materials in Australia are about three times the price of the UK. It is astoundingly expensive to renovate a house over here.

We did look at bathroom fitting in Domayne, but that was just extortionate. Bunnings was almost as expensive. Even the renovation specialist take an arm, leg, and the other leg.

Particularly, as we wanted to get Grotte fitting. Grotte in Australia are the most expensive you can buy. Once I’d reconsidered the economic options – and talked myself down from the ledge – there was only one way to go. You can save a fortune if you buy direct from the supplier, in Germany. Admittedly, they are made in China, so they go half way around the world, only to come back the same way and then some, but the savings are immense. About 65%, including the extra you have to pay for postage. So... total cost for the bathroom, with luxury European fittings. $865. Bargain.

And true to their word, everything arrived perfectly, with a shipping time of under two weeks. Even the suppliers in Australia were quoting a month, so that I think neatly proves that retail in Australia is overpriced with woeful service.

No punds in ten ded.

Asbestos? He as best os with none. (Say it quickly, and it kind of makes sense. I apologise).

There is no asbestos in this ere house. Plenty of termites, rot, and probably a light touch of the death watch beetle. But nasty fibres? None.

Even the experts were confused. They were sure the sheets I had were the nasty grey stuff.

But no, once they’d sealed off the place, and peeled off the sheet, they found it was stamped on the back, “no asbestos.”

Well, that’s a weight off my mind. And several hundred dollars out of my pocket.

This Asbestos dream home

Work on the bathroom continues apace.

Or at least it did, until I took a few loose tiles off the bathroom wall, and discovered what appeared to be sheets of Asbestos making up the wall.

Now, Asbestos was once considered the wonder material for building. You could turn it into sheets. It wouldn’t catch fire. You could drill it, saw it. Even make a bathroom cabinet out of it. I know: we had one in the family.

But after a while, people started getting ill. In the UK, it was only used for a few garden sheds, but in Australia most of the post-war dream homes of the Western Suburbs were built of the stuff. And that was when people started keeling over, in alarmingly high numbers.

Instead of being inert – as many builders had thought (as in, wouldn’t ‘ert a fly), it was infact composed of millions of minute fibres, that once sawn, broken, drilled, anything in fact that was the reason why people bought it in the first place, and it would lodge in the lungs, causing a painful death some 20 or 30 years later.
Sydney is now the asbestos death capital of the world, with thousands dead thanks to what they thought was a new life in the country.

And now I’ve found my asbestos sheets, I’m understandably anxious that I don’t follow them. Which is why the whole gammit of environmental waste disposal are swinging into action on Tuesday, sealing the place in plastic, sucking the life out of the air (but, you note, not me) and carting off a ton of asbestos.