Oh how I hate the cheap bastards who built this place! The QLD building codes seem lax enough already and still these folks didn't leave many building sins uncommitted.

New bits: well, everything - as you can see on the photos below, stored in Conny's room. Eventually this pile of stuff will transmogrify into a functional, hopefully good-looking bathroom...

Conny requested that I provide before-during-and-after shots, so here you are: the lousy state of affairs before. The bathtub is ridiculously short, the hollow-but-closed hob/bench thing above it wastes loads of space, the vanity cabinet is grotty, the shower is leaking and the tiles are very much ready for replacement. Way to go!

Over the weekend I ripped out about half of the tiles in the bathroom (the shower is still in use and I need to do things step-by-step), which took just about forever as the tile glue on the floor still works very well. Chiselled for over two hours, squatting on the floor and grateful for hearing and eye protection. The walls were easy, the cheap fellas didn't even use a toothed spreader for the glue there.

The first annoyance I found was the relatively lousy quality of the mortar bedding they did (2.5cm thick on top of the concrete slab), some of which stuck to the tile shards in places. Quite some craters I'll have to fix before tiling.

The second bit is the shockingly shoddy way they built this: plopped the vanity cabinet on the slab, put the tub in and then simply poured the bedding on the floor, of course only up to the tub frame and vanity cabinet. Which is chipboard, got wet at some point and rotted out at the bottom as the second-to-last photo shows.

Then there's the drains: no traps that I can detect for either shower or tub. Everything gurgles nicely. All of which leads (sic) to the Heart Of Darkness:

This is the 100mm diameter open gully/drain in the middle of the room, into which all three others drain spew their mess...noisily. This thing seems to have a trap downstream (as the bath doesn't smell), but it's still grotty and as the other drains enter this shithole a bit above the waterlevel things are never quite quiet.

For a while I did consider closing it up fully (concrete is your friend), but in the end decided not to: (unfortunately) the QLD building codes require a floor drain in bathrooms, laundries and toilets. Most likely I will buy one of those Tile-in hidden drains and use that; that way it will at least look fine - about the gurgling I can't do a thing.

That's the state of affairs so far. Further bulletins to follow as events warrant.