Why: Because he has a medical condition that requires one and a half hours of sitting on a toilet each time he has his treatment session.

Budget: Nil… due to the cost of his medical supplies, which of course take priority.

Meet Caleb… our 8 year old, red headed, sports loving, energy filled, tender hearted, witty humoured and reading enthusiast son. Caleb has had a long term health condition since infancy that this past March saw him admitted to our local children’s hospital for an insertion of a Cecostomy tube.

Caleb’s bowels do not function as they should. The Cecostomy tube (a tube placed directly into his cecum – large intestine (via his abdomen), allows us to administer medicine to flush his bowels empty… something he cannot do by himself. It takes an hour and a half each time to do Caleb’s treatment, during which time he must remain seated on the toilet. I don’t think I could do that, so my hat goes off to my boy.

We have dedicated our downstairs bathroom for Caleb’s treatments so we can keep our upstairs one available to the other members of our family and also have a dedicated place for all of Caleb’s medical supplies. Our downstairs bathroom is cold (it’s in our basement), aged and plain old boring for an 8 year old to spend so much time in. Thus enter… ”Bathroom Makeover” (a dream for us) for Caleb!!

I have lost count of the number of times I have stood in the doorway of this bathroom, trying to conjure up ideas of how we could possibly make it a nicer place for Caleb. I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know how much to dream for this or to even believe that we could make this a “fun” place for Caleb to hang out. It’s a bathroom after all. Is it even possible to make a bathroom a “fun” place?

Here are some wish list items that come to mind for this bathroom makeover to become a reality…

• A source of heating – we have no furnace vent in there
• New flooring – we cannot afford to run “heated” flooring, but something nicer than the cold, stained and scratched vinyl would be nice
• A new shower stall – the current fibreglass one is old and scratched up, the glass door is permanently etched from the previous owners not cleaning the hard water from it often enough, the surrounding tiling has flowers on it and the grout and silicone are stained
• The vanity – The vanity has also aged – It smells of cat pee (I am not kidding) and I have tried EVERYTHING to rid the smell from there. The same “flower” tiles surround it. The sink is scratched and stained… also from the previous owners not taking care of it.

A fun place to be? To me, “fun” conjures up images of a new paint job, a kid like theme and activities for him to do while he sits on the toilet for an hour and a half each time. Yikes! A room that is warm for him is also high on the list since Caleb also suffers from circulation problems which make cooler temperatures hard for him to cope with.

I would love some ideas from readers on how to do the above. We don’t mind DIY’ing, but must admit that we have never done a bathroom ourselves. Being the “decorator” in the family, I would also love some ideas on how to transfer this into a more fun place for Caleb to spend so much of his time.

Can’t wait to get some feedback!

Oh, one more thing… we don’t have a budget for this. EEK! Not all of Caleb’s medical expenses are being covered by our government or insurance, so our money is being fed into that right now. Like I said earlier though… right now this just seems like one big dream, that of course I would love to make a reality for our son. Too bad those home improvement / surprise makeover shows never make it to where we live.

Guest post written by my wife, Tamara Hutchison.

I finally had someone explain to me why we were getting staining on our ceiling around the exhaust vent in the bathroom. My wife and I had thrown around a few different ideas like:

• improper seals around the roof vent
• insufficient vent strength
• condensation in the attic
• improper ventilation
• leaking pipes

After the bathroom ceiling fan starting to rattle on the weekend I decided it was time to replace the exhaust fan. I figured while I was replacing one fan I might as well replace them all as they are all old and they don’t actually clear the steam from the bathrooms during showers.

When I was there purchasing the new exhaust fans I was told why our current fans and ventilation is leaving a stain on the ceiling. The problem is that the ventilation is not insulated. This causes condensation to form on the outside of the pipe and run down the pipe to the bathroom ceiling.

Then I install the new bathroom exhaust fans I will be insulating all the exhaust vents in the attic with either spray foam insulation like in the photo from the Ask the Builder article about bathroom fan ventilation, or by wrapping it in standard pink batt insulation.

The basement vent so far has proven difficult to put in as I need to work from underneath between the basement ceiling and the main floor. There isn’t much room to work in and it’s been hard to attach the ducting to the fan in the limited area before attaching the electrical. I’m hoping that working in the attic for the top two fans will be easier, but I haven’t been in the attic for our new house yet, so we will see what is up there soon enough …

When we had to rebuild our bathroom we actually had to pretty much rebuild all of the internal and external bathroom walls. Two of the walls had the frames rebuilt or reinforced, while the sheeting on one of the sides was left intact. The other two bathroom walls were completely removed and the frame and sheeting completely replaced.

It was certainly interesting to watch them do this. The photo on the right is of the load bearing external bathroom wall (you can see it completely removed in the photo at the top of this post). You can also see the side external bathroom wall on the left side of the photo. The back wall they completely removed, but the side wall they rebuilt parts of the frame, while keeping the external cladding intact.

The main internal bathroom wall was one of the walls that they managed to rebuild the frame, while keeping the sheeting intact in the dining room. There is now a bit of a bow to the wall in the dining room, but it is fairly minimum when compared to the the amount of reinforcing that they did to the bathroom wall frame. In this wall they actually installed four cyclone rods, but I will talk more about those in a future post.

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Since getting our new bathtub and actually being able to have deep baths we have discovered that we never have enough water . The reason for that is that our hot water system is a electric storage type and it’s only 125L!

According to this hot water usage chart 125L on the off-peak electrical tariff, which we have it on, doesn’t even register as being usable, it rates as N/A. If you have it on the continuous electrical tariff it is still only good for 2 – 3 people, but that tariff costs over twice as much to run.

So I guess that sometime down the track we will probably be looking into getting a new hot water system. I reckon that we will probably be looking at a new solar hot water system , since the government currently has rebates on it, they save money in the long run (ROI of around five years) and it’s good to take care of the earth where we can.

In the mean time I will be increasing the temperature in the tank a bit to see if that makes it more usable.

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In choosing our new bathroom taps we actually decided to choose to get mixers, instead of individual taps. Our builder actually reckons that mixers require less maintenance, last longer and generally work better than separate taps do. Tamara and I personally think that they look better as well.

Our vanity mixer looks good and is working pretty well so far. Caleb unfortunately couldn’t reach it as first, as it is a bit high, so we got hime a new bathroom stool. Now he handles it pretty well, but it was a bit of a learning curve for him as apposed to the separate taps.

We got a similar looking mixer for the bath and shower with a built in diverted for the shower.

For the faucet in the bath we got a faucet that could rotate or pivot. We thought that this would be good to get it out of the way when we bath the kids, but it has also proven to be helpful for us as well. Having the faucet pivoted out of the way while showering allows a bit more room in the shower and saves me from banging my shins on the faucet.

Full bathroom photos should be coming soon, but Tamara keeps telling me that the bathroom isn’t complete until the towel rails are up. Currently the new towel rails are on order, so when they finally get installed we will be posting our new bathroom photos.

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Part of the fun of our bathroom renovation was choosing a new vanity and basin. It was quite the experience again because like with our bathroom wall and floor tiles we only had an hour or so do it, it had to come from one store and it had to be in stock.

Again Tamara and I surprised ourselves by being able to choose our vanity and sink quickly and in full agreement. Here it is, sort of…

I say sort of because the one in the middle is the 900mm (36″) version, the one on the right is the 600mm (24″) version and if you look in the top left you can see the drawers from the 1200mm (48″) version. We had originally chosen the 900mm version of the vanity. Our old vanity had been a 900mm version, so we figured we would choose that same size again.

However, it was decided that we would be removing a partition that was in the middle of the old bathroom and because of that we were able to get the larger 1200mm version, which I don’t have a picture of (other then that small corner). We were pretty glad that we were able to get the wider vanity, especially for our growing family and extra storage space below. We did get the semi-recessed style, which actually works really well in our long, narrow bathroom.

For the bathroom basin we really wanted to get a china top, rather then a plastic top basin. In our old place we had the plastic top and we had a lot of trouble keeping it scratch free, especially with Caleb. We are hoping that the china top bathroom basin will prove to be harder wearing.

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I think the thing that probably surprised me the most when we were picking our bathroom tiles was that Tamara and I agreed on the tiles almost right away.

The tile that is actually on the wall is the tile that we picked as our bathroom floor tile. The one that you see there is a rectangular tile, but we actually chose the square version of the tile.

The white tile that you can see is the tile that we choose as our bathroom wall tile. It looks plain white in the photo, but it actually has a ripple effect to the tile, which makes it look very cool we think and helps to break it up a bit.

The other mosaic tile we are using in feature strips at the head of the bath tub and at the side of the tub.

When we get that bathroom finished I’ll be taking photos so that you can see the final result with the bathroom tiles, but we think that it should turn out looking pretty stunning.

One of the things that helped us agree is that because of the urgency of the bathroom remodeling we had to choose tiles that were in stock, and only from this one tile shop. Despite this limitation we are really happy so far with the bathroom tiles that we chose.

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The bathroom walls are all sheeted and the bathroom floor is waterproofed. The have also waterproofed the wall around the bath tub and the sheeted frame around the tub that is holding it up.

Tomorrow they should start to tile the bathroom and we hope that we will be able to start painting mid-week and move back into our house by the end of the weekend.

They have also replaced the sheeting on the office ceiling as they had to pull down that ceiling sheeting to secure the roof to the walls.

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Yesterday they managed completely remove the exterior load bearing bathroom wall and build a new one, all in one day.

The old external load bearing wall in the bathroom had been cut in half in places and was sitting on the crumbling old concrete floor. It really had to be replaced since it was expected to hold up the roof in that back half of the house.

They have not yet cladded the exterior of the load bearing bathroom wall, but the sisalation has been installed, as well as some ply to give it a bit extra rigidity.

The new wall looks a heck of a lot cleaner and stronger than the old one did. All of the wall studs go right from the top to the bottom of the load bearing wall, without being cut in half like the old wall was.

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They have finished installing the new bathroom floor in our upstairs bathroom. After ripping out the old bathroom floor, it was good to see how quickly they got the new one installed.

The obviously started by putting down the new floor joists. They attached them to the bearer on the internal side of the bathroom, and then welded brackets onto the steel beam on the outside of the room and attached the joists to that.

It looked a heck of a lot more secure than the original bathroom floor did.

After putting down the new floor joists they then put on 16mm villaboard. Villaboard is a material that is generally recommended for use in wet areas, as it is extremely resistant to moisture, and is very hard wearing.

They will be waterproofing the entire bathroom with a water proof membrane, hopefully before the weekend comes so that they can start tiling on Monday.

Technorati Tags: villaboard, bathroom, bathroom renovation