Bathroom: a Space to enjoy “The little things”

This evening as I drew myself the deepest, hottest and bubbliest bath ever ,I couldn’t help but think about just how much I really needed to relax. As my beautifully fragranced Champneys bubbles began to really get going I noticed to my sheer horror the mother of all wasps, the literal Godzilla of the wasp world!! Naturally being the damsel in distress (of course which I was) I escaped out as quickly as I could to find my wasp defeating Husband. Tea towel and cup in hand Scott came to save my much-needed bath.

After one flight around the room Godzilla caught sight of my inviting bath and decided to nose dive straight in! Good for you waspy, you obviously need to unwind from your non napping, crisp only eating offspring too – was my initial thought. My thought a nano second later was- you total bath stealing Bitch! How on earth am I now meant to lie and switch off knowing that only a few minutes earlier you ended your life in here?! (dramatic I know, I very much am).

Que massive sigh and standard shower.

Why am I telling you this? well because being able to have an actual hot bath is something so very little but so very momentous all at the same time. It says now is time for me, just me and only me. When we viewed “The Ryder Residence” there was one room that we both hated, the bathroom.

Only it wasn’t a BATH-room at all but very much a SHOWER-room. Having just stressed the importance a bath is to me, I knew that I couldn’t live a single day in this house with this room as it currently was. Amelie was also only five months and still very much in the thick of her Milk allergy, colic and reflux! The bath was one of the most integral parts of her bedtime routine, I couldn’t deal with this going out the window and potentially changing our current 1-2 hour stints of sleep ( Yup she was that bad).

October 17th we moved in, October 18th so did the builder.

Before we moved in we had already purchased our whole bathroom suite. We opted for a specialist range within Homebase who offered well made, good quality suites for narrow bathrooms. The virtual plan was perfect and so having purchased it all ,we went on to ask for the fitting quote. £8,000 Homebase wanted to fit it, not to take out our current bathroom too, just to fit it! Scott and I literally LOL’d, madness! what’s even scarier than that price is that they had a current three-month waiting list, which meant people were actually using their services!

Savvy Senses to the rescue. I started googling like mad to find a local plumber who could help. The cheapest I could find was around £6,000 – not cheap enough. I then remembered a friend of mind who is super Savvy and having renovated her own beautiful house on a budget I knew she’d help me on my quest. Lauren from www.theshrewdlife.co.uk was fantastic and gave me details of a fab plumber she knew.

To my absolute delight we were going to be getting the current suite ripped out and the new one fitted all for just over £5,000, £3,000 less than Homebase!! SUCCESS!

Before

As you can see, its awful! The cladding had to come off, we had to have the walls re-plastered, shower removed and an actual bath fitted which then meant new tiling was needed on the wall. It was a mammoth job, but our plumber made it all look so easy!

During

THE EDIT:

When feeding Amelie during the wee small hours of the morning, Pinterest became my best friend. Before buying a single thing I would use it to design a mood board around the look or theme I wanted to create with the room. This was a photo I pinned that was exactly my vision to a tee:

Source: Pintrest

I would encourage doing this for every new room project, it will give you focus and ensure you stay on theme – it’s also super fun lusting over all the delicious homes!

Before we set out to look for tiles I hauled Amelie around all the local DIY stores I could think of, comparing prices and seeing which sales assistant looked the likeliest to take bribes.

I’m a firm believer of “believing is seeing”. I knew I was going to find a bargain deal, I just had to believe it with all my mite that it was going to find me, and it did!

Note: This voucher no longer exists.

and just like that we were buying everything from Wickes!

Et Viola – Space for us to enjoy “the little things”, like a wasp free bath

Tiles- Wickes. (My Father in law has the skill set from heaven and saved us a fortune! He did all the tiling for us, Amazing! )

Flooring- Marble vinyl from a local carpet store that was open to a fab deal! We bought this flooring along with the carpets for our

whole house in one go. I googled carpet store new openings as I knew they are more likely to negotiate on prices. The owner and I could have been selling at Blackbush market the way we were haggling! Another one of my Savvy mantras “You don’t ask, you don’t get”. He managed to turn a blind eye to some boring paper work and set us up on a trade account, meaning we cut out the middle man and saved a small fortune. I had a price in mind and so when he offered basically that, I couldn’t help but push my luck and got him down another £50 and he threw in free delivery! This was a very proud moment for me, Scott on the other hand was slowly dying of embarrassment.

Mirror, shelves – Homebase

Print and frame – Not on the high street and Wilko

Toothbrush holder and Toilet brush – Debenhams ( But now discontinued)

Thanks for reading fellow bath lovers.

Love