Make Life Simpler

Helping you make more time for the things that matter

  • All About Anna
  • Contact
  • Categories
    • DIY and Crafts
    • Food and Recipes
    • Holidays and Travel
    • Our Home Renovations
    • Personal Posts
    • Style and Decor
    • Pregnancy and Motherhood
    • Life in Yorkshire
    • Weddings
    • Organisation
  • Disclosure
  • Images
  • Link Parties

Our Home Renovations

House: The Way to a Girl’s Heart is Warm Towels!

Our first big DIY project in the house (other than shelving and painting and hanging a few pictures) was installing a heated towel rail in the bathroom. Today it is lovely and sunny outside and nice and warm, but thinking back to when we did this in February (on Valentine’s Day actually – isn’t there some saying about  couples that DIY together staying together?! Or did I make that up?) it was really damn cold around here. Snow and minus temperatures. Not fun at all, and definitely not in the mornings running soaking wet from one end of the long, very cold bathroom to the other for a warm towel after a shower. So a solution was needed.

I saw a towel rail on eBay for super cheap, and Ste bought the pipes and fittings necessary, and we set about plumbing ourselves in some warmth. Well, when I say we, I of course mainly mean Ste, but I was on hand to pull up carpets, hold torches, tighten screws, and prevent cats from getting lost under floorboards, as well as keep the tea and pork pies coming.

Towel Rail| Anna International

Towel Rail| Anna International

This was the first of a few short-term fixes for the bathroom. As a whole, it is fine, so we plan to live with it for a while and instead focus on some of the more awful aspects of the cottage decor, such as the woodchip wallpaper everywhere. The other thing that we need to do in the bathroom is remove the Grecian murals which are absolutely horrendous (you can see them in these pics). Luckily. the two murals only cover six tiles, and we found a whole bunch of spare plain ones in the cellar, so we have already replaced two of them with plain tiles under where the towel radiator is, and have the larger mural still to remove. Once that is done, I can happily leave the bathroom as is until we are ready to redo the whole thing, though we do need to get new flooring because the carpet in there is very old, and carpet in a bathroom is just wrong anyway. Since we will eventually change the layout of the room quite a bit, we’re not going to tile it, but some inexpensive lino will certainly improve things for now.

Ste had already installed a filter on the central heating, as well as moving the overflow pipe, so I knew his plumbing skills were good, but I had no idea how good until we got started on this project. It took a while to pull up the layers of carpet, underlay, ply-boards and ancient floorboards (I was hoping for beautiful ones, but they are gappy and patchy. Sad) and we were amused to also discover the second staircase (from one of the two cottages knocked together to form ours) still there under the shower, descending into blackness. Creepy. Ste managed to connect pipes to the existing system that brought the water over to the side of the room we needed, and then connect up and fix the radiator to the wall. It took most of the afternoon, mainly because figuring out what goes where and which pipes are actually connected to anything took time. There are two separate plumbing systems (again, left over from when it was two houses) and neither of them is logical at all! The whole house needs re-plumbing and re-wiring at some point, to make it slightly more coherent, but that is a huge job and an expense we cannot afford right now.

Towel Rail| Anna International

Towel Rail| Anna International

Eventually it was all done and we had towels warming on our brand new radiator.

Towel Rail| Anna International

Ste then joined me for our Valentine’s Day meal (wild boar pasta accompanied by a bottle of Moët) and we toasted our first successful proper DIY job. Or rather, Ste’s. He is awesome, and I am very lucky that his idea of the perfect Valentine’s Day is the same as mine – working together on our home and then sharing a meal and a bottle of something nice. We ended the evening with a cheese board and a sneaky little Scotch before retiring for a nice hot shower, dried off with lovely fluffy warm towels afterwards! Bliss!

Towel Rail| Anna International

Towel Rail| Anna International

 

If you liked this, please share!

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Pinterest
  • StumbleUpon
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn
  • Pocket

Related posts:

Guest Room Renovation | Anna InternationalHouse: Progress on the Guest Room New Home: First Steps | Anna InternationalNew House: First Steps in Making it Home Bathroom Inspiration | Anna InternationalBathroom Inspiration: House Next Steps Our New Home! | Anna InternationalThe Big News: We Bought a House!


Click here to signup to receive my latest posts by email.

« Recipe: Classic Tuscan Bruschetta
Quick and Easy Rhubarb and Custard Pots »

Comments

  1. Fred Stewart says

    12 May 2015 at 7:40 pm

    Reblogged this.

Trackbacks

  1. Recipe: Homemade Personalised Pork Pies for Father’s Day | Anna International says:
    20 June 2015 at 9:31 am

    […] Father’s Day I wanted to make Dad something a bit special, and inspired by the pork pies I gave Ste for Valentine’s Day (bought off the internet, not homemade) I decided to have a go at making my own personalised pork […]

  2. Bathroom Inspiration: House Next Steps - Anna International says:
    15 September 2015 at 2:02 pm

    […] It wasn’t really a conscious decision that it should be next, more of a, what-do-we-need-to-do-before-the-serious-renovation kind of a decision. Basically, our house is two cottages knocked into one. The staircase of the right hand cottage is the one we use, which comes up in the centre of the house, and, along with the huge chimney on one side of it (which we don’t use) takes up nearly a metre of space in four rooms – the living room, dining room, our bedroom and the small spare bedroom. We want to get rid of the staircase and chimney to regain that space. To do that, we have to open up the left hand staircase, which is right in front of the entrance, and at the moment is boarded off, save for the first few steps which are currently a cupboard where we keep our wellies and outdoor shoes. It comes up underneath the bathroom, as we discovered when we installed the heated towel rail. […]

Welcome to Make Life Simpler!

I'm a 30-something working mum living in rural Yorkshire with my husband, our young daughter and our pets. This blog is about my attempt at creating a nice home and life for us with minimal effort and time.

Here you can find simple recipes and meal planning, easy DIYs and crafts, home renovations on a budget, simple sustainability, jaunts around Yorkshire and further afield, and life in the countryside.

I hope you might find inspiration in some of the things I share and give them a go. Let me know if you do! Read More…

  • Bloglovin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Subscribe to get new posts by email

@make_life_simpler

Follow me on Facebook

Categories

  • DIY and Crafts
  • Food and Recipes
  • Holidays and Travel
  • Life in Yorkshire
  • Organisation
  • Our Home Renovations
  • Personal Posts
  • Pregnancy and Motherhood
  • Style and Decor
  • Weddings

Most Popular Posts

Life: Organised (or ‘why I love a beautiful diary’)

Life: Organised (or ‘why I love a beautiful diary’)

posted in Organisation

Baby’s First Christmas

Baby’s First Christmas

posted in Personal Posts, Pregnancy and Motherhood

How to Make Big Decisions?

How to Make Big Decisions?

posted in DIY and Crafts

Quick and Easy Traditional Easter Biscuit Recipe

Quick and Easy Traditional Easter Biscuit Recipe

posted in Food and Recipes

The Merits of Labelling Your Life!

The Merits of Labelling Your Life!

posted in DIY and Crafts, Organisation

Looking for an Older Post?

You might also like

Why I wanted to do a Maternity Photoshoot

Why I wanted to do a Maternity Photoshoot

The End of Maternity Leave: How It Really Feels

The End of Maternity Leave: How It Really Feels

Recipe: Tuscan Baked Eggs

Recipe: Tuscan Baked Eggs

For the Love of Coffee: Pact Coffee Subscription

For the Love of Coffee: Pact Coffee Subscription

Spring has Sprung: Time for the Garden!

Spring has Sprung: Time for the Garden!

@make_life_simpler

Copyright © 2019 · Divine theme by Restored 316

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Sorry about this, but I'm obliged to tell you that my site uses cookies! Please click ok and this message will disappear! Ok