Forget being an interior designer. This week I am mostly shivering. Or making cups of tea. Or stomping about the house in a bad mood. Yes the builders are back. I’ve got plumbers ripping out the upstairs bathroom and leaving dusty damp footprints everywhere. I’ve got roofers tearing the roof off the downstairs wet room to fix the leaks and replace the skylight. The electrician popped in at lunch time to drill some more channels in the bathroom because he probably thought there wasn’t enough dust in the house. Knowing my luck the joiner will turn up tomorrow a few weeks early just to get in on the mess.They weren’t all supposed to be here at the same time but if you’ve ever had to wait to get your roof fixed you’ll know why I didn’t turn them away when they rocked up at 7.45am this morning. The word elusive was invented for roofers.
I’m trying to ignore the disruption though and focus on what my lovely new bathroom will look like when it’s finished. As a nation we seem to be stuck in a chrome rut when it comes to bathroom fixtures. You go online and browse any of the major bathroom stockists ranges and if they do have any gold fittings they are limited. Admittedly gold bathroom taps used to have an association with avocado baths and rose pink carpets but I think enough water has passed down the plug hole for us to re-embrace gold fittings. I did start scouring eBay and salvage yards to see if I could get some lovely old antique brass fittings but what I could find was in poor condition and I would have ended up with a very mismatched suite of taps, cistern levers and plug holes. So in the end I decided to give the bathroom the Midas touch and go with bright polished gold, and I think with the soft grey colour palette and the victorian floor tiles it’s going to look gorgeous, particularly if it looks as good as some of these bathrooms…
The bathroom should have been a one week job but they need to reinforce the floor joists to hold the new cast iron bath, and re-plaster the walls because they’re too wonky to tile as they are. So it’s turned into a two week job. But hopefully the roofers will finish tomorrow and become elusive once more so I can get a hot shower – with a view of the stars through my new mahoosive skylight!
