As I type this, my bathroom doesn’t exist.
To be clearer, the actual room where my bathroom is located exists. There’s even a toilet in there, which I can use in the evening. But if we’re talking about the bath that goes in the bathroom, that’s not there. Nor is the sink. It’ll all be there tomorrow, unless there’s a small disaster, but otherwise I don’t really have a bathroom at the moment.
This is slightly inconvenient, of course, but inconvenience is the cost of progress. Or, at least, the cost of not having things leak all over the house, which is what the current bathroom has an irritating tendency to do. So the decision was made to rip it all out and start fresh, with new and exciting bathroom fixtures that will build into a nice bathroom that’s much better than the one that came before it. I find myself getting quite excited.
The fun thing about renovations is that you get to see how well your house was built the last time. You get to see the corners cut, the bad (and good) decisions made, what happened the last time the house was torn apart. Some of the stuff we already knew, like how the vanity was way too big for the space so it was difficult to get to the toilet, or how nobody thought to put an exhaust fan in a bathroom. Some stuff we didn’t, like the bizarre materials used to put in the shower. It’s an adventure in ripping everything out and putting it back together again.
Of course, this is an old house - it was built in 1911, and the bathroom “design” is so weird that you can easily assume that indoor plumbing wasn’t a thought in anyone’s mind when it was made. After all, without curtains the neighbor would get a full view of the bathroom’s user. The age of the house naturally means that there are challenges that another house might not have. This also explains why the renovation was necessary - so much copper, so many leaks, so many things that need to be ripped out.
It also makes you appreciate just how difficult doing renovations is. This isn’t a cheap project - you wouldn’t think such a small room would be so expensive - but when you watch them doing what they’re doing, I totally get why it’s so expensive. I could probably do one or two minor repairs. I even replaced the toilet once. But all of the pieces that are being moved around and replaced, all of the parts that have to be redone and rebuilt. And it’s our only bathroom. I might be able to rip things apart and put them together on a computer screen, but what these guys are doing, I could never actually accomplish. It’s so much work, most of it I can’t do. The room itself will be so different once it’s all said and done that I know, for certain, there’s no way my lack of handiness would have made any of it possible.
In some cases it’s also work that I would never want to do. I once moved a bed upstairs, it was awful. Do I want to move a bathtub up and down the same stairs? No. Absolutely no way. If I can get someone else to do it, that’s going to be way better for everyone. They get paid. I don’t have to do what was a hellish task. A win for everyone.
Renovations are like anything in life - changes have to be made, some minor, some dramatic, because if things stay exactly the same there’s no way you can live like that. I can’t live with having water drip downstairs when I’m taking a shower. I can’t live with just how humid the room gets after everyone in the house takes a shower. While it was fine when there was just one person in here, the more we have the worse it is, until the house simply doesn’t work anymore.
I’m pretty excited to see what it actually looks like when it’s all said and done, and while it’s in no way cheap, it’s still nice to see that this change is going to be one for the better.
