Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

Preparing the Storage Room for Construction

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To make way for the next member of the family we have finally started to get moving with the plan to convert the storage / furnace room to a new small office and storage / furnace room. After getting professional quotes of between $16,000 to $22,000 we are doing with the help of a friend and a few sub-contractors. This will drop the price to substantially less than what we were quoted.

We started by pulling down the old plywood and shelves that were up in the room. This will make it possible to install the new electrical, data cabling, soundproofing, insulation and drywall, as well as extra backing for the wall cabinets and shelves. The extra backing will mean we won’t need to use plugs to put heavier items on the wall, which is great.

To clear the way for the ceiling bulkhead we had to move some of the plumbing lines as well. The were originally just tacked to the bottom if the floor joists, but we have now run them through the joists so they won’t get in the way. We’ve also had to plan for continued access to the water shutoff valves, which we will do with access panels in the ceiling.

I’ll throw up some plans soon with how it’s going to look when we are done, but we are basically just cutting the room in half, with an access door from the office into the furnace room.

Better Bathrooms UK Store

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I was contacted by www.betterbathrooms.com with a request to review their web-site and services. The company is located in the UK and has physical locations in three different locations:

  • Wigan
  • Warrington
  • Manchester

Better Bathrooms provides delivery of 3 – 5 working days for most of their products, and next day delivery of all their in stock items. They can deliver their products nationwide to the UK and Ireland.

When Tamara and I were looking for our bathrooms in Townsville having a big variety to choose from was great. Better Bathrooms has a huge selection to choose from including:

  • Full Bathroom Suites
  • Toilets
  • Baths
  • Bathroom Furniture
  • Taps
  • Accessories
  • more …

The Web-Site

The BetterBathrooms.com web-site is very well laid out and it is easy to find pretty much anything that you might be looking for to put into a bathroom.If I could not find the bathroom items in the easy to navigate categories then I also had the option to search for the item. The search results were very thorough and generally came up with pretty good results for the items I searched for.

I selected a bathroom suite that I quite liked and added it to the shopping basket to see how the checkout system worked. Once I put the item in I was presented with some other “related items”, one of which I added to the shopping cart and then continued.

After putting in a friend’s post code from Harpenden I was surprised by how inexpensive the shipping was for an entire bathroom suite at only about £35.00. The next screen, the first one where I had to fill in any personal details, was an encrypted and secure page, which I would want before proceeding further.

Although my friend in Harpenden is one of my best friends, I didn’t really feel like ordering a £900.00 bathroom suite for him, so I stopped the order process here…

Customer Reviews

Since I’m in Canada and can’t actually order anything from Better Bathrooms, or check out a show room, I had a look at what others were saying about the company…

  • Trust Pilot includes 233 reviews of of BetterBathrooms.com and the company got an average rating of 7 out of 10.
  • On Google Maps UK the company received an overall review of 4 out of 5.

Conclusion

I must admit that after browsing the BetterBathroom.com web-site I really want to redo the bathrooms in our house, especially our ensuite. There are some great ideas and packages on there and even after doing the conversion to Canadian Dollars the prices seem to be quite good.

If I was living in the UK near one of the show rooms in Wigon, Warrinton or Manchester I reckon that BetterBathrooms.com would be one of my first stops to get ideas and purchase products for my bathroom remodel.

Help Organise your Kids Bookcase

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Using Bookends to help Organise our Kids BookselfWe’ve been struggling with getting our four-year old daughter to organise her bookshelf. It’s quite difficult for her to actually put her books on the shelf without knocking them over and getting very frustrated.

When we set-up our office we picked up six Ikea Inreda Book-ends. I ended up only using four of the six that we purchased, so we had two spare. We decided to try using those bookends to help our daughter with her books.

Usually I get frustrated with bookends. They’re normally too light and slide around whenever  books are leaned against them. If they don’t slide around they are normally too heavy to be practical in a kid’s room in their bookcase.

Ikea Inreda Book EndsThe beauty of the Ikea Indreda Book-ends is that they actually attach directly to the kids book self. This way they don’t slide around and the kids books don’t knock them over. By putting them fairly close together like in the top photo even if the books do tip they won’t actually fall over since there isn’t room for them to fall.

Since we put the new book ends on our daughters book shelves the bookcase has stayed neat. Our daughter is also able to put her books away all by herself without getting frustrated, which is good for her, and also good for us.

In Canada the bookends only cost $6.00 for a set of two, so it makes for a very cheap and easy solution for helping our daughter keep her book shelf tidy.

Stop Water Stains on the Ceiling in Bathrooms

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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 …