Toot Sweets En Suite

Happy Monday folks,

I have a yarn to spin today, mostly involving toilet humour but with an excerpt of exploding expanding foam!

This episode starts way back, last October, before the world was in quarantine, and you lot had better things to do than read our blog.

Since Simon and I bought the house in April 2019, we have been visiting in the holidays, trying to get started on some of the myriad of jobs that need doing.

Luckily for us, Simon's good friend Chopper and his lovely wife Wendy agreed to come with us and help get the room next to our bedroom ready to be transformed into another bathroom.

It had bare floorboards and you could see the roof rafters and backs of the roof tiles. There was also a massive hole in the wall going into the hay loft next door....no one can work out why this was, yes it was a mystery...  but this wouldn't deter The Camo Shorts Team!

The CST, as they'll now be known, worked like men possessed! The ceiling was insulated, plaster boarded and taped. A false floor was made and the pipework for the toilet was laid. Two new windows were also fitted and the gaping hole in the wall was filled. Three sentences describing what they did does not really do it justice. The house was built about 150 years ago out of the local granite stone, and despite the amazing skill of the local stone masons, stones are not man made brick shaped, and therefore, the house is not quite square. There's wonky corners, an adverse camber on the first landing hallway and all the internal doors are different heights. So, as any of you who are DIY enthusiasts will appreciate, they had their work cutout. 

A non camo short day

New window

Hole filling extraordinaire!

New floor joists

Thank you Chopper and Wendy for all your help 😘

Jump forward to the present day. Here we are, no longer on holidays and able to go back to sunny Leighton Buzzard and live in luxury, with an upstairs toilet, and hot and cold running water and takeaways...

So, after the bread oven chimney debacle, hair full of spiders, cobwebs stuck on my eyelashes etc... we could finally tackle the rest of the bathroom.

Enter...Simon and Carol...aka Walter and Jesse, starring in their own version of 'Breaking Bad', aptly named 'Going Mad'

I know what you're thinking, they're fashion icons now they're living in France. Don't try and emulate us, you won't be able to pull it off with the same aplomb.

We are actually professionals and dressed appropriately for the job in hand....sanding down the plaster board ceiling.....what a bitch of a job 😒

We cracked on, despite our arms dropping off, and Simon even found the energy to sand down the oak beam so I could beeswax it. He's a good egg really. 

Back view

Front view

Meanwhile, there was a storm brewing...

Simon then had what we'll refer to as a Clements' Clusterfuck. 

All I can say is, I'm glad he doesn't know how to swear in French because his language was enough to make a sailor blush. And those Clements' are loud let me tell you. Hollering and shouting....drama!

Did I rush to his aid.....no, I stayed out of the way, as anyone in the immediate vicinity is usually bombarded with curses.

After a suitable amount of time had passed, and he'd stopped yelling, I ventured up stairs to see what could possibly have caused such a cacophony.

Note the blue hue in the middle right hand section

A can of expanding foam had exploded, to be fair, he had managed to get it absolutely everywhere imaginable...all over his clothes, his shoes...I think there was even some in his beard...pretty sure that's a fairy tale 😏

Needless to say, he recovered his usual good humour, two or three hours later, and the rest of the plumbing essentials were laid.

We had another lucky break when another pair of lovely friends, Gary and Alison, donated a gorgeous claw foot tub to our bathroom suite. 

And, as you can see, the battening out of the room is complete, ready to be tongue and groove panelled, mostly because the walls are so wonky that tiling would cause another Clements' shouting and swearing episode....and nobody needs that kind of drama....