Month: September 2010

Bathroom/toilet is probably the single most daunting part of a house renovation. Before we embarked on our home renovation, we did A LOT of research over the Internet as well as reading home improvement books (ok, the boyfriend did, I only had the fortune of reading all the relevant stuff he copied and pasted to me on emails). It’s really important to read up because then you’d be able to gauge your contractor’s level of knowledge and experience.

If your contractor claimed that he could change your toilet position where ever you fancy, BEWARE. It’s not recommended to change your toilet’s position (unless you’re planning on tearing down the entire house and rebuilding a new one) because that would mean moving the outlet pipe, which is a very taxing task and not to mention, RISKY. If your contractor didn’t have the chops to do it, you might just end up in a world of shit. Literally.

Even tasks like water proofing the toilet and tiling requires a lot skills. So yeah, that’s why it’s important to know your contractor’s skill level.

For instance, it probably seems a no brainer buying toilet bowls. You measure the space you’ve got, go to a shop and choose the design and size that fits best, right? Nope, it’s not that easy. First of all, you need to have the measurements of the distance between the outlet pipe from the wall, which you should be able to get from your contractor. Each and every toilet bowl has different tolerance of distance so you have to buy the one that fits. We wanted all the sanitaryware in our bathrooms to match so we were very lucky to find one model that could tolerate the “outlet pipe – wall” distance of all our three bathrooms, which are 6″, 9″ and 12″ respectively.

So after the toilet choices are narrowed down to the right fitting then only you can start choosing designs and size. The person selling the toilets to you should be able to assist you with finding the correct fit. If they can’t, please stay away ;)

There are generally two types of toilets; syphonic and wash down. Syphonics are the ones that flush down in a slow circular motion and are quite trendy now due to its supposed feature of saving water and almost silent flushing. Wash downs are the traditional ones that flush everything at one go.

But what many people don’t know is that your outlet pipe plays a main role on whether to get syphonic or wash-down. The rule of thumb is, if you don’t wish to run the risk of getting floaters, just get wash-down. Unless you’re absolutely, 100% that sure your outlet pipe is straight, do not get syphonic toilets!!!!

Another thing I did to make sure that the bathroom sinks and toilet bowls fit comfortably with ample space to walk and dance in my bathrooms was that I made actual size cutouts of the sanitarywares and placed them over their respective position. That way, I could see for sure how the space would be like after installation. Some people have a good feel about space, I don’t, so doing that really helped to ease out the space concerns.

Okay, hope this helps! I can’t think of anything else to add on, but will do so when I figure out more things. Feel free to ask any question in the comment section or better, feel free to comment about additional stuff one should be aware of when renovating a bathroom, will deeply appreciate them :)

Posted from my Crackberry.