Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

Renovating the Upstairs Bathroom

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It’s sort of funny, I was flipping through some of my old posts trying to find photos of our office and I came accross this quote:

That does bring up another problem though, what happens if it starts to leak again? How will I know until it has actually destroyed the ceiling under it?

Given the option I would just get rid of the spa bath all together and redo the entire upstairs bathroom, but I can’t see that happening any time soon …

Given the fact that we have just ripped out the floor, ceiling and walls in our upstairs bathroom so that we can completely renovate the bathroom to replace the crumbling floor I thought that was kind of ironic. It made me smile, although I am still not in a chuckling mood right now.

Original Article: How to Fix a Spa Bath

Tying Down the Roof Trusses and Load Bearing Walls

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To be honest I am so emotionally tired right now that I don’t really feel like writing anything, but I am hoping that this will help me to process a bit…

On Friday last week, if you recall, we found out that we need to replace the floor in our bathroom. This means gutting the entire bathroom and starting from scratch with a new bathroom floor, walls and ceiling.

I got a phone call this morning from our builder asking when I would be home, and suggesting that I bring a camera with me when I come to take a photo of something.

So I get there and he shows me how after removing the wall sheeting he can lift up the roof just by pushing on it ! Here is a series of photos of the wall frames, the roof trusses and the ceiling frame, I’ll explain more about the problems after you see the photos.

Load bearing internal wall - with non-structural timber Where are the roof truss tie downs Cut up load bearing wall with no roof truss tie downs

The top two photos show the wall between the dining room and the bathroom. Although it is an internal wall, it is a load bearing wall. Being a load bearing wall it should be made of structural grade timber (it’s not), it should have a large, high strength continuous beam running the entire width of it (it doesn’t) and it should be tied down to the roof trusses (again it isn’t).

The third photo shows the external wall, which is also a structural / load bearing wall. This is where our builder was able to lift the roof just by pushing up on it. The external wall at least has the continuous beam running the full lenth, and some of it is structural timber, but a lot of the wall framing has been cut in half to put in the louvers and the concrete floor, and again the roof trusses are not tied down to the top beam on the wall , and some of the trusses have been installed upside down.

With the roof itself there is also not enough support for the tin that is there . There is supposed to be either 60 or 90 cm between the timber under the tin (I can’t remember which at the moment), but on our roof there is nearly a metre and a half gap in some places!

Our builder reckons that most of these problems continue into the office area of our house as well. So he will be pulling down the ceiling in the office, which is sagging in a lot of places, and having a look at it.

I won’t know until tomorrow what this all means, but what I do know for sure is that the renovation costs are now due to blow out even more. We have already needed to change our expectations to where we won’t be moving in under the house anytime soon, so I don’t know what all these additional problems with our roof and load bearing walls is going to mean…

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Spa Bath for Sale

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You probably have a week if you want to purchase our old spa bath. You can have the pump too, but it needs new seals in the spa bath pump as it leaks right now when you turn it on.

Old spa bath for sale

It’s a 1400 x 1400 cream coloured spa bath, which matching cream taps. Because I didn’t take it out I can not guarantee that all the pieces are still there.

You can read a bit of the history about our spa bath in the acticle Why our Spa Bath Leaked.

If you want the spa bath you need to make an offer below in the comments and organize to pick it up yourself. Sorry, no shipping is available.

Bathroom Floor Repair Urgently Needed

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We had an interesting and rather expensive day on Friday.

I got the following e-mail from Tamara while at work:

Ummm? The bathroom news doesn’t sound too good. I asked the builder to be honest with me and he made a few comments. I could tell he was trying to hold back. Apparently the whole floor has a cement layer underneath which over time will not be good for the joists underneath it. He has told us to PLEASE do the bathroom before we start sheeting in underneath.

They will fix the leaks as best as they can but some more plumbing work will obviously need to be done when we renovate it. I guess we should start looking at those show homes eh? Yeah, I’m a little stressed.

When I got home for lunch I talked with the builder myself, and it’s not a good story.

Sagging Bathroom Floor

Bathroom Floor Restigng on BearersThe bathroom floor is a concrete slab that weighs about 2.5 tonnes. The floor has no joists, bearers or reinforcement like rebar inside the concrete slab to support it. The only thing supporting the slab is about 5 cm of the slab that sits on the bearers on each. It’s bad enough that the builder told us he was nervous to get more than one or two people standing on it.

To add to the simple fact that the bathroom floor was constructed so poorly the plumbing was done all wrong as well and has probably been leaking for as long as the bath has been in there. The water hasn’t been dripping, which is why we didn’t notice it, but the water has probably been soaking into the bathroom floor, making it even weaker.

Closeup of Concrete Bathroom FloorWhen they poured the bathroom floor they used a cheap ready-mix concrete, which is why they reckon it was soaking in the water. Given how brittle the concrete is, I can believe it. The builder reckons that the whole job was just a DIY stuff up.

The only way to do the bathroom floor repair on this sort of floor is to get rid of the old bathroom floor and rebuild a complete new one. So that means that we will be moving out on Tuesday for about 1.5 weeks while they cut out, or jackhammer out the old bathroom floor, and then build an entire new bathroom.

Concrete Bathroom FloorThe new bathroom floor will have, if I can remember right, timber joists with 16mm villaboard on top. On that will be a waterproof seal with all of the joins being taped. Then we will be getting a new tiled bathroom floor on top of that, along with a new vanity and bath. The only thing that we will be able to save from our existing bathroom is the toilet.

Given the condition of the bearer that you can see in the photo it’s a surprise that the floor didn’t collapse during the house lift. The bearer is complete rotted out, but it is now reinforced by a steel beam run along beside it. I’m not sure if the builder will be replacing the bearer as well because of the new steel one, but we will see.

We had always talked about wanting to remodel the bathroom up here, but we were thinking cosmetic stuff like the bathroom tiles and vanity, and that was going to be down the track when we had a bathroom down stairs. But now, because of the fun with the bathroom floor repair being needed, we will be getting a new renovated bathroom sooner than later…

We will post more later about what we are thinking of doing to it. Maybe after we visit some show homes tomorrow.

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