|
Plan your improvements
Before you start shopping for your new bathroom suite, it's a good idea to work out exactly what's possible in your new bathroom - and how much of the work you can do yourself.
Plan
Firstly you need to draw a simple scale plan of your bathroom. If you take accurate measurements you may find the store that provides the new bathroom suite will do the design layout for you. The plan needs to be roughly to scale - 20:1 - in other words, 20mm in the room is represented by 1mm on the paper. This means you can fit a bathroom 4m x 4m on a piece of A4 paper.
On this plan, ignore the location of the existing bathroom suite but mark the location of the waste outlets, the water pipes, door, and windows.
Do not start removing the old suite until the new one arrives and has been checked to make sure it is the correct one, and that it has not been damaged.
Waste system
The waste system is the least flexible aspect of the bathroom, so the waste pipes must run downhill from the fitting to the soil pipe or outlet. The waste system includes the soil pipe - the large (100mm) diameter pipe that the toilet flushes into. Bath and shower wastes are very close to the floor - to get a good slope (fall), the entry into the soil-pipe must go quite low - in many cases this will be under the floor. Waste water does not run uphill so plan carefully.
Know your water system
It is important that you know how your domestic water system works. At the very least, you must discover how to turn the hot and cold water off.
The cold water to the bathroom may be fed from the mains and so controlled by the stopcock or it may be fed from the coldwater tank (cistern) in the attic if this is the case there should be a valve where the pipes comes out of the tank to control the water flow. You may also find a valve here to control the hot water flow. Hot pipes will usually be run in 22mm copper pipe and cold water in 15mm copper pipe.
Once you have turned the water off you can strip out the old suite. It may pay to do this an appliance at a time however you do it let the family know what you are doing and plan for any eventuality. As soon as you disconnect the toilet, chances are someone will want to use it!
|
