The Roquefort Files

Your eyes do not deceive: that is indeed a temporary shower cubicle, rudely fashioned from plastic dust sheeting and overpriced Homebase lumber.

After the orgy of tile destruction, we had a plasterer take a look at the hollowed-out shell where the bathroom used to be. He quoted us a hefty price for a two-day job to fill in the lower portions of the walls with plasterboard (from whence we’d ripped the horribly abused panelling and tiles) and then to finish them off, ready for painting or tiling.

“What if we did the plasterboarding ourselves?” I asked. At the time, this seemed like a capital way of reducing the cost and of speeding things along, and he sportingly maintained my suspension of disbelief by lowering the price by £150 and cutting the time down to a single day.

Financially, we’re certainly better off. The human cost, on the other hand, was incalculably higher. Wars have been less punishing. We suffered the Chinese water torture of a weekend spent driving to and from Homebase—I mean like three times a day—and of the crushing, endless fucking expanse of wall left to board at any given time.

Please excuse my language. It was a trying time.

The turning point was around 5.45pm on the Sunday evening: we’d gone through 10 kilos of plasterboard adhesive (seriously, the stuff just disappears when you stir it into water; it sublimates into dark matter or something) and still had half the room left to go. Homebase closed at 6, and this was our last chance to finish the job before the weekend disappeared along with our sanity. I jumped into the Saab and hoofed it along the road, getting there just as they were starting to turf out the customers. Jean (oh yes; by now we were on first-name terms with the staff) pointed me in the right direction and I was genuinely, pathetically grateful to find that they had a couple of bags of adhesive left in stock. I babbled my relief at the cashier. I must have been starting to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

We finished up that evening and I spent the next three days dreading what the plasterer would make of our workmanship. There was the possibility, for example, of a sharp intake of breath. “Oh dear,” he might say. “Did you remember to trim the gudgeons?” Or perhaps: “I see you’ve mitred the winkles. That’ll be difficult to work around…” and then he’d hit us with an extra day to do the job, or some additional fee for the danger incurred by our amateurish construction efforts, or would retreat making the sign of the cross and vow never again to plaster a tenement bathroom.

In the event, he was quite happy. The work took a single day and that evening we had silky-smooth brown walls begging to be tiled and painted.

Of course, just picking some tiles and sticking them up was too easy by half, so I spent a couple of day vacillating over whether to go for white or cream, made a snap decision to go for blue instead, regretted that decision as soon as I hit the “Complete order” button, regretted it even more when the tiles arrived, negotiated an exchange of blue for cream with the tile company and finally, a week later, swapped them over in an Ibrox warehouse where forklifts and 18-wheelers dodged each other in a dance of mechanical death.

This all came too late for the arrival of Ash’s parents last week, so I was obliged to throw together the temporary shower cubicle you see above so that they could ablute without fear of dropping through water-sodden floorboards.

Last Wednesday then, Neil came over armed with a variety of tile-fitting tools and we attacked the tiling with a vengeance: achingly now crackle-glazed subway tiles in hand, we spent 12 hours measuring, adhering and cutting. We caught an absurdly helpful break (my eyes misted over, I tell you) when we worked out that the big wall was exactly a whole number of tiles+grout long, so we avoided fully half of the cutting we would otherwise have had to do on that wall. The shorter wall took longer—the more we tiled the slower we got—and when we finally finished I just had time to give Neil a lift to catch the last train. (Cheers man! We would never have gotten this done without your help.)

In between touristy ramblings over the next couple of days, Ash’s dad helped me with the grouting and with replacing the shower, and by Friday morning the bulk of the work was complete. I sealed the various edges with a triumphant flourish (and silicone sealant, which is more water-resistant) that weekend, and we were done.

Finally.

At last.

Now onto the floor, walls, skirting and ceiling.