Fitting the toilet was fiddly, to say the least. It could only go in one position (because of the soil pipe) and the back wall was precision engineered to take the close coupled cistern. The floor fittings were hidden and required drilling in to the floor in exactly the right place so they could be pre-fitted, then the toilet placed on them and screwed in to place from outside the pan. Then there was precision plumbing and getting the cistern attached to the pan in a way that we could still manhandle it in to position and so it wouldn't leak.
It was a fun day.

Loo first. Dave got on with putting in the remaining backer boards behind the toiet and the tiles at his leisure during the week, and also planed off the slighly protruding part of the shower tray support. Sadly, that did impinge somewhat on the shower tray itself, so he stopped that PDQ. We'd already decided we were going to tile the vertical surfaces so it didn't really matter, but we ordered some stone effect 1-inch microtiles for the job (on back-order from good old Topps Tiles).
Once the back wall was done, he turned his attention to the floor. You remember they cowboys who built this house popped both loos on a pile of concrete? Well as much as we tried, we couldn't really get the floor flat. Dave initially tried it with tile cement but that took days to dry. The final solution was to knock off all the proud bits (SDS drill) then use self-levelling compound to give us a flat floor. We did that really successfully back in Wilcote Road days (in the kitchen) so were confident it would do the trick. The only decision we had to make was whether to level the whole floor or just the loo section. Dave played it by ear and stuck with the loo section.

On to the actual tiling. Now marble is unforgiving and we didn't want to rip our feet to shreds with uneven corners or edges, so we decided to use a floor levelling system where you placed inverted T shaped spacers under each tile and then pushed in a wedge to bring the edges flush to each other. Clever idea really. Pulls everything up to the same level, rather than trying to push down in to tile cement. We also hired a proper water cooled tile cutter. Yes, I know we bought one for the wall tiles, but it struggled with ceramics and there was no way it was going to handle marble. Dave spent several days cutting tiles and dry fitting the floor, including the fiddly bit around the towel rail pipes. Eveything was neatly stacked in order to had over ready for the weekend. We had previously discovered that you can't lay floor tiles on premixed cement, so we'd acquired a suitable supply of dry mix tile cement, a couple of buckets and a small version of the cement mixing drill attachment (we had a big one we bought to destroy apples when making cider a few years ago, but that was too big) for smooth muck mixing.
It was time. No more prep was humanly possible. The cement was precision mixed and brought in to the bathroom - spreading and tiling commenced, with Dave doing the buttering and laying, me handing over tiles, spacers and wedges in the right order.

24 hours before we could walk on it, so one last shower in the office.

The bigger ones went on better and it was easier to see when they started to drift off. Nothing in this house is square...
Dave continued with tiling on Monday and Tuesday, including the hairy pastime of drilling holes in the tiles for the shower plumbing. He did quite a nice job of that.
He started tackling grout on Tuesday afternoon. We (he) found that it went off VERY quickly, so ended up throwing half the first bucket away. We decided to take Abby out to lunch for her birthday on Wednesday so didn't get a huge amount done, but Dave topped up grout supplies on Thursday and got all the grout on the completed tiles done by the end of Friday. I got the lucky job on Friday after coming in from work of cleaning surplus grout off the tiles. We then decided to silicon the bottom joints against the tray and in the corner to give it a chance to go off before we started on the enclosure on Saturday. I have to say (though I'd forgotten we'd bought it) that a powered - i.e. controlled - silicon gun was an excellent acquisition. We also decided that lovely that the blush grout looks, it's very expensive so we'll probably go for white on the remaining dry walls.

With all the tiling done, it was time to tackle the enclosure. Have to say, 10 mm shatterproof glass is heavy.. Dave drilled the holes for the vertical track on the far wall first, and decided that the 3 points the manufacturers recommended were insufficient, and we ended up putting in 7, partly because the top screw hit a screw within the stud wall, so wasn't as tight as we'd have liked it. Manhandling the screen in to place was a bit interesting. I didn't realise quite that the channel on the glass fitted over the channel on the wall (rather than within it) and got an interesting little pinch on the finger as a consequence. However, it did go on  very nicely.
On to the little return that's designed to stop the shower spraying water all over the bathroom. I released it from its packaging and discovered a bag of strips which we weren't quite sure what to do with. Fixing the top guiding bar and right angle frame to hold the return was a bit fiddly and because the design had changed versus where Dave had placed the extra studwork to take the frame. Anyway,  we got that in and having looked at the instructions, he discovered the strips were to stuff in to the joints after siliconing the glass in place. Dave started dry testing the strips and we decided that the fit would be so tight that the silicon would be redundant, so continued putting that in place for both the side wall and the return. It was an interesting technique involving a flat bladed screwdriver and squished parts of your other hand (thumb in my case, palm in Dave's). We fitted all the supporting struts etc and were ready for the final glass sheet.
'twas heavy. Technically, according to the packaging at least, we fitted it upside down, but the little CE emblem was at the bottom on the other two screens, so I saw no reason to change that. Dave fitted the channel with the recommended 3 screws and we then person-handled the screen from it's storage space in the loo to its final resting place in the bathroom.. This one didn't slot in quite as neatly as the first one, so Dave squeezed the channel on the wall all the way down, then hey presto, it slotted on nicely, even though I wasn't entirely sure whether I should be pulling or pushing. Anyway, it's in.
Fixing screws were inserted, overhead structural bars installed (next time Dave says "don't pick that up, it'll be hot" when he's trimmed a metal bar, I will believe him) and though a little bit of removal and refitting was required, all was well.
Final act was to put in the silicon on the outside of the screens and we'll be ready for a shower very soon...

Oh yes, we fitted the integral towel rail where it's supposed to go - on the outside of the shower - and decided it is definitely going to be in the way of the loo, so refitted it on the inside. Job done.

Still doing lots of stuff with wood, preparing for the tray to sit on. Extra panels to take various attachment points and the shower seat for when we get old and wrinkly. Dry fit of the shower tray had the drain pretty spot on for location, which led to a wet test, which was passed successfully (see video).

We've changed from a concrete bed to a fix and foam one, hence the bricks filling out the voids in the framework. Laying the tray down was potentially the hairiest moment of the weekend. Long story short, we had two cans of fix and foam loaded and ready to go, with the shower tray placed vertically against the far wall. As Dave started to squirt fix'n'foam everywhere I realised I needed to find somewhere to put my feet which wouldn't  involve them being part of the permanent fixture...
Safe to say, I tiptoed myself to safety but we realised that 2 cans weren't going to cut the mustard, so Dave disappeared in to the room of requirement and conjured up two more. I shook one, while he used the other... then lobbed the empty one in to the bin and grabbed the other one to finish the job. At that point I realised that I had essentially painted myself in to a corner and needed some pretty nifty footwork to get out of the way so we could lower the tray in to position. Mischielf managed. We pinned the shower tray down with excess bricks and gave up for the day.

Once the tray was down, we we started on the tiling.
I truly forgot how dull tiling is. Yes, you get instant gratification as the tiles go up but there are spacers, cement drips, mess, yukky stuff. We got the right wall tiled on Sunday afternoon and Dave was prepared to take on the far wall on Monday...

Check out the captions on the photos below for more insight, but Tomas nailed it when he pointed out that we'd turned the corner from the "complete tip when everything is messy and you can't really see yourself making much progress" to the "it's looking much more tidy now and ready to go" stage. We placed the shower tray down this afternoon to site the drain hole and, bar a few cm of 38 mm pipe, it was pretty spot on. Dave managed to source a shallower trap that will let us minimise the step up even further, so happy days.

In the meantime, Dave spent the day soldering the copper together and laying the drainage pipes for the basin and shower. He also retrieved the basin pedestal and realised the basin taps' plumbing needed to splay out a bit, so redid them.
Friday was all about fixing the shower controls in the right place (building out from the existing wall) and making sure all those were water tight. There was a bit of re-jigging on the shower pipework and once that was done, the replacement for what "Boss White" used to be called most certainly didn't cut the mustard. After applying a toothbrush to the Boss White gunk, Dave reverted to the trusty PTFE tape to a much more satisfactory conclusion.
After holding and moving things earlier in the day, I turned my attention to the Virgin Hub 5 replacement that should give us Gigabyte broadband, I started at 10 past 3 and it's currently 10 past 8 and Dave is still on the phone to Virgin trying to cancel the landline that doesn't work with our new package... Enough to say that at least we got to talk to some human beings at Virgin who (I think) resolved our issues...

...so we thought. The laptop was connected via the VM wifi, my phone was working on Dragonet and Dave's wired connection was OK, but Abby's wired connection decided to drop out and her phone wouldn't connect to anything. Once Tomas got home, we found that his phone would connect to VM  but the signal was so low in his room to be useless, and his wired wasn't working which was very weird because other wired devices from the same hub were OK. Decided to sleep on it, having had quite enough of being the network administrator by now.
Update: Everything appears to be OK now (laptop now on Dragonet and Tomas reports all is well; Alexa works and the Blink cameras are back online) though we're yet to hear from Abby on this fine Saturday morning. Update on the update: had to troubleshoot Abby's network card, but all is OK now. Both the printers are working (the Phaser needed a restart) - I think we're done.

Having unboxed the pan, we took it in to the bathroom to see where we could site it in relation to the existing soil pipe. The design of the pan meant that we kind of had to straddle it over the soil pipe, which means we don't get much sideways wiggle room, sadly. We also test sited the shower again and decided that a sideways brick on a decent mortar bed would give us enough space below for the drain. Both of those activities contributed to deciding on the false wall depths. We also decided to take up the old lino tiles to allow the shower bed to be flat and they came up so easily with the little reciprocating saw that we decided to take them all up.
Next job is to get the copper plumbing in place, so we know where to break the vertical studs in the wall. However, I took the opportunity (after removing a few floor tiles, one of which was a complete pig) to dispose of the now-surplus-to-requirements plastic pipe that we were going to use to plumb in the shower that never made it. You can see the pipes poking out of the wall at just below bath height in the first photo below. The HippoBag is looking pretty full and we have called for the pickup. Because of the nature of a bath, there is technically a decent amount of space in it, but it's all under the bath.

Dave spent most of the day cutting, dry fitting, unfitting, fluxxing and soldering copper pipe. Everything is cut and in place for the basin, the shower, the toilet cistern and joined back to the outside tap. The right-hand wall is completed and wet tested (he hasn't lost his touch, no leaks) and the fluxxing and soldering will continue tomorrow. I couldn't make much contribution to any of that, so apart from finishing off getting up the lino tiles from the basin and loo areas, I wasn't much help.

Oh yes, Dave had to make his daily pilgrimage to ToolStation for some kinky connectors to allow one run of pipe pass over the other.

Unloading the stuff from Wickes first, then dismantling the loo. The fastenings bolting the cistern to the wall were unidentifiable, so Dave went straight to the angle grinder for both bolts and pipes. It came off the wall relatively easily and was carted off to the HippoBag in the midst of a cloudburst, which meant I wasn't sure how much cistern water I slopped over myself on the way out (don't worry, cistern water is clean) compared to rain. Next, to the main event - removal of the toilet.
Sadly, the cowboys who built this house did the same with both loos - rather than bolting the pan down through the nice pre-drilled holes in the porcelain, they plopped it on a dollop of concrete and let that ooze out of the holes. At least this one was straight, unlike the original one in the little loo. Anyway, that spelled the end of an in-tact removal. Dave got most of the water out, then I'd just turned my back to take out some pipework and the cistern lid and nearly jumped out of my skin as the the sledgehammer was applied to the porcelain! I think he quite enjoyed that bit.
We collected the pan shards in a box for removal, but after a couple of whacks, it was clear that the concrete dome of doom was going nowhere. It was also apparent that nearly 50 years of usage (the house was built in the mid-70s) led to some interesting, how shall I put this... build up... on the front side of the waste pipe - think silting up on the inside of a river bend...
Dave retrieved the trusty angle grinder (the big one we bought for this project) and a dust sheet, so while I applied the gaffer tape to the dust sheet and the bathroom doorframe, he prepped the beastie to dice up the offending dome. It wasn't a completely succesful dust seal, but it was good enough. The angle grinder did a reasonable job but because the blade is curved, there were bits it couldn't get to, which meant our daily trip to ToolStation to get a set of SDS bits/chisels to attack the remainder with the Ryobi drill.
Dave worked away at the rest of the lump and once he'd conquered it, my rather pathetic contribution for the day was to clear up the rubble into the HippoBag and have a bit of a sweep and a clean up.

Which were very much heavier than I remembered. Secondary one came out relatively easily and though heavy, I could woman-handle it to the HippoBag (well, next to it because we needed the bath to fit in squarishly. The second door (the original one) was a bit harder to release from its somewhat more manly fitting and was too heavy for poor little old me alone, so we wiggled it out of its housing then the pair of us got it to the same place as the other one. After removing the bath modesty panels we discovered a trove of unused bathroom/plumbing bits and pieces, some of which (outside tap fitting kit, extendable shaving mirror and a loo roll holder/towel ring/toothbrush holder type set) I put on the village Facebook page. As far as I know, the vanity set is still at the end of the drive
Then to the bath. First, Dave cut through the silicone sealant then we pulled the bath out (well, wrenched it off the brackets that were still there) and dragged it far enough out from the far wall so he could disconnect the taps and drain. We then decided that the only way to get the bath out via the living room and hall would be to remove the legs and the taps (which he did) then once we'd got it partly out, decided the drain had to come out too. We got the bath outside relatively easily (a plastic bath is a lot lighter than a toughened glass shower screen) and into the Hippo Bag (I'd already move the stuff out that we put in last night to make sure nobody absconded with the empty bag.
The rest of the afternoon was spent removing under-bath rubbish, redundant pipwork, a quick visit to ToolStation for more drainage stuff because the existing basin drain was too high for the new shower tray and we're going to divert the outflow to the shower drain instead.
That was pretty much it today, other than removing the grab handle for re-deployment and the old shower mount plus the "new" shower that never made it to getting commissioned. We had some discussion about the position of the drain and whether we were going to have to drill a new hole in the outside wall. Dave eventually solved that by taking a hammer to the drain that we wanted to replace and persuading it that it really wasn't a permanent feature.
No first aid drama today, and the bathroom really looks big with very little in it.

When was the last time we actually used the bath for a bath? OK, we had a roll-top bath in the apartment we had for summer hols a couple of years ago and it seemed rude not to use it, but to be honest, getting in and out made it a bit of a palaver. So, after we were back from Stoke, we decided to take the radical step to get rid of the bath, and install a walk-in shower.
We selected what we wanted in the way of sanitary ware from Victorian Plumbing, but as we'd never completed the full bathroom refit we did not long after moving in, we didn't need a new loo or basin. Then to planning...
To be frank, the plumbing in the existing bathroom is a dog's dinner (it was like it before we got our hands on it!) and the walls are far from flat, so we thought it best to install a couple of false walls to hide the pipework from the basin that used to be hidden behind the bath and the plumbing for the shower unit itself (and to accommodate the possibility that the new loo might need to be further out from the end wall than the current one is). So we needed studwork and backerboards for that. That, of course, would make tiling those two walls considerably easier. We selected tiles from Topps Tiles and decided to tile the whole room.
Then I booked some time off work.
Orders were issued that the final shower in the old bathroom would need to be completed by 10.00 (ish) on Saturday morning and after a trip to ToolStation for some plumbing bits and pieces, rippage commenced at about 1.30 pm. I forgot to mention, we got a bathroom-rip-out sized Hippo Bag (yes, they really come for that - look for yourself). All the junk that had accumulated under the basin over the last 20 years went first, then the basin and its pedestal, so Dave could cap off the hot and cold water feeds that came out the side of the airing cupboard. I had forgotten how hideous those tiles were... Once he could get to the pipes we turned the water off and he set to with the little reciprocating saw... the one with a 20 mm blade that wouldn't make it through the 22 mm plus paint pipe... (picture 1). I was packed off to ToolStation again for a bigger saw blade and some wet and dry sandpaper to get rid of the paint (pictures 2 and 3).
The next step was to cap off the pipes so we could turn the water back on again, which went very well for about 2 seconds, then Dave slipped off the spanner and sliced his right index finger open against something on the floor (screw head or tile shard) and picture 4 ensued. Wrapped it up tight with plasters and tape so he could get the pipes capped, then reassessed and re-dressed with plasters and more tape. Time to stop for day one.