Oh, I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside ~ Fitting the Bath

I’ve been worrying about fitting my new bath for a while now. When I first ordered the new bath I was confident that we could easily do a DIY bath replacement and I was sure that it would look amazing after we’d finished it. But ever since the bath arrived, my confidence began to disappear and worry took over. First, it was the fact that I took a second look at the bath and realised that it didn’t have any tap holes. Is that a deliberate mistake? Where do I put the taps?! I look at the item specifics on the website and this is completely normal – the tap holes were to be drilled by the installer. This reassured me, as I thought I’d made a stupid rookie DIYer error and ordered the wrong thing! But thankfully, as an acrylic bath it could be easily drilled to accommodate the taps – although I was already thinking about other options for this!

From investigating the tap situation online, I started looking into DIY factsheets about how to fit a bath. And that’s when I really started to get scared. The DIY instructions were far removed from my initial imaginings that I would just unscrew the existing bath panel and simply swap the old bath for a new one! There were all kinds of details for shutting off water supply (which I’ve never needed to do before!), earthing the pipes, and something about water supply contamination – scary stuff! I worried on my own for about an hour as I read up on bath fitting techniques and then I asked my husband whether we’d bitten off more than we could chew. Absolutely not, he reassured me. He’d installed sinks and showers before and told me that a bath is just a ‘big sink’, so he’s be more than capable. However, I insisted that he called his father for help and we decided that the three of us would tackle the job together with a bit of common sense and a lot of following instructions.

I’m pleased to report that all my worrying and wobbling was completely unnecessary. As soon as we began to fit the new bath, it became clear that I’d fallen into the self-diagnosis-online trap and had become a plumbing hypercondriac. It wasn’t the massive week-long job I’d imagined it to be and we managed to fit it within a day. There was much more siliconing than I’d imagined (did you know that even the bath waste plug hole needs to be siliconed in?) but at least this ensured that nothing is leaking!

Our fabulous new bath from Bella Bathrooms

I took another day to finish off making the bath panel using the last of the shuttering wood that we’d rescued from the skip and hubby built us a much-needed under-sink storage cupboard to complete the ‘fitted’ look.