The Bathroom Floor.

The saga of the bath is now done and dusted, and is a story improving in the retelling.......

One of the reasons for moving the bath was that, TARDIS like, it seemed bigger than the room containing it. The other reason was the bathroom floor. Bouncy - spongy even - and full of old borer holes, it had to go. This was a decision well made, as during the process of moving the bath I put my foot through a floorboard. (You can see the floorboard in question just behind Adrian in this pic.

All this rot meant that the old floorboards came up pretty easily, leaving this mess:

This presents me with a small problem.

The "floor" you can see is plasterboard, nailed to nasty cheap bits of pine, and forming part of the dining room ceiling. The nasty cheap pine is nailed to other bits of nasty cheap pine, which in turn is nailed to what passes as joists. One of those joists (the one in the middle of the above photo) is half a tree that at one stage appears to have acted as a roof beam. It is let into the stonework at either end, and rolls quite alarmingly.

The other joist (the one against the wall) isn't attached to the wall, and bounces a bit. This is not a good foundation for a tiled bathroom floor.

You can also see a length of orange plastic conduit. This is what the French use when doing electrical work - no doubt this will not be the last time it makes an appearance on the blog.

My current plan (the latest in a long line) is to use joist hangers to support new joists 2"x6" (bastaing 50x150) at a 400mm spacing, over which I will put chipboard sheeting specifically designed for wet area floors (something like this). All the masonry hangers I have seen so far get built into the wall - I can't work out yet if I can bolt joist hangers to brick walls, or whether this will tear the walls down. (The latter is an important consideration. I don't think Susan would appreciate me drilling our house to bits in the guise of fixing it.....)

Simon