Our Cloakroom (WC) Renovation: Before & After
At long last, our downstairs toilet is now done and free for everyone to use. It took us about five or six months to finally get it to a point where we're happy with it all and I'm so happy to share the process with you. But first, let me show you what the downstairs loo looked like when we bought the place back in November last year...
This is the only picture I have of the WC before we started work on it. It was a very messy process to get it how it looks today, especially with a towel warmer being in there now, albeit an extremely small one, but it does the job. So all of the white plastic boxing you see coming along the walls are pipes and the small white "tiles" are actually stick-on polystyrene things that were just stuck onto the old wall tiles.
The sink was tiny and very shallow, meaning you couldn't really get your hands in to clean them, so that needed sorting straightaway. But the thing that really drove us to do this room first was that the loo didn't really flush very well. Mainly because the cistern was extremely small and the pipe going into the toilet from the cistern was at a very harsh 90 degree angle, so now wonder it didn't have the power to take toilet paper away. It was unusable to visitors, so we decided that something had to be done.
So we started by stripped the room of all the polystyrene tiles and the ceramic ones underneath. Then we scraped off all the wallpaper, which was also underneath the ceramic tiles until we got the plaster underneath, which was a sight to behold. Once we could see what we were dealing with, we replastered some parts ourselves and spent most weekends plastering and sanding it down to get the walls to look as straight and as polished as possible.
But before that, we buried the pipes in the wall and hid the waste pipe from the sink behind some skirting board, which can just about be seen in the after picture. After that, we covered it all up and plastered it in which, of course, required sanding. We then put the small towel warmer in as it was always very cold in that room and it smelt damp because of the polystyrene tiles.
After that, we needed a new loo, but a modern one. We didn't want a toilet with a cistern attached to the outside wall and back to a pipe with a 90 degree bend on it because we'd have been back to square one. So what we did was find the smallest, most compact little toilet we could find and build a fake wall behind it so we had something for the cistern to attach to and be supported by.
We then bought new window boards because the original one in the window was PVC and it looked and felt horrid. So we ripped that out and put in a wooden window board. We also added new skirting boards and architrave and primed and glossed them at the same time to give the same finish.
The corner sink was also a tough find as not a lot of places sell nice-looking, reasonably-priced corner sinks. Both our sink and our toilet are Ideal Standard, however, so we know we've invested in quality bathroom products that'll, probably, get more use than our upstairs bathroom.
Not to forget the corner mirrors the last mirrors put up as well. There were eight of them. Four on one side of the wall and four on the other. But the thing is, they were stuck to the wall using silicon, they hadn't even used the clips that came with the mirrors to mount them to the wall. In fact, one of them actually fell off the wall unexpectedly, that's how badly they were put up. So we got rid of all of those and bought a simple, large, circular mirror that faces the toilet.
We were also forced to put coving up in there because the ceiling wasn't in very good shape. It had a textured finish to it originally so we sanded it back and smoothed it down but it didn't leave a very good finish. We had hoped to smooth it back and paint over it but it just looked awful. So we were forced to buy fresh textured paint. But it actually looks pretty good as the old ceiling had turned grey and dull so it was nice to give it a lick of fresh paint.
We also replaced the light fitting because the old one was timed. It would come on when you walked in the room but then it would go off again after about ten seconds. So you'd be left in the dark waving your arms around to get the light to come back on again, because it was motion-sensored. We ripped that out and replaced it with a proper bathroom ceiling light that looks far more modern in comparison to the other one.
The floor was also an issue for us, we didn't like the tiles at all, so we simply laid laminate floor over the top of them. After that, we found some tiles to use as a splash back, which was also a hard decision, believe it or not, and voila! It's now a completely decorated, fully-functioning downstairs toilets for our guests to use :)
Anyway, enough talking now, let's show you our finished product!
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I hope you liked this blog post? I know it's been a long time coming, well, it has for me, but it was all worth the mess and the hassle in the end. Have you ever undertaken a project like this? Let me know in the comments below and I'll see you again very soon with a brand new blog post :)
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