Wash basins, wash basins and more wash basins

The house is a former guesthouse, so most of the bedrooms (6 on the top 2 floors for starters) have a wash basin with associated built in wardrobe and under wash basin cupboard.

The quality of the work is very low for the wardrobes etc… (bit of 2 by 4 timber with thin plywood skin, the wardrobe hanger bar is a peice of copper pipe!) and we don’t need a wash basin in the kids bedrooms, they’d wet everything knowing our kids!!

So I’m in the process of removing them.

On Saturday I finished removing the last remenants of the three wash basins on the top floor. Thought it would take much longer than it did, but once I had the confidence to start cutting copper pipes it went quite quickly.

Have to admit I was concerned I might get the wrong pipes

Like a lot of things about this house whoever put the basins in didn’t do a good job.

The top two floors are pracitcally identical in layout, the consist of three bedrooms in an L shape with the base of the L being the two front bedrooms.the remianing space is taken up by stairs and landing.

In between each floor (few steps lower) there’s access to a 4 storey extension that houses a full bathroom (top 2 floors have an identical bathroom). So the top floor has three bedrooma and one full bathrrom and the florr below it is almost identical.

Now the hot and cold water supply to the wash basins start at the bathroom for that floor. The two pipes are laid under the floorboards on the back bedroom that then spits into two, one going to the back bedroom basin the other going through the wall (under the wall) passed the passageway and into the right front bedroom basin. The left front basin is fed from a couple of holes in the wall between it and the back bedroom (see image to the right, you can see the copper pipes coming trough the wall).

I’d been in the attic to check for pipes and found none going directly to the basins from the very small water storage tank and I’d removed the access panel to the pipes in the bathroom, so was reasonably confident I had the right copper pipes. Just to be on the safe side I decided to work my way backwards, cutting the pipes directly off the basins and then work my way back to the source pipes in the bathroom.

I’d turned the mains off an turned several taps on in the bathrooms to drain the tank (this took just minutes as the tank is really smalll!). I’d bought one of those small pipe cutters from B&Q (I grabbed the image to the right onlne, the B&Q one is red, but same design).

They are a bit fiddly to use, but do the job suprisingly well. If you haven’t used one before you clamp it around the pipe to be cutm twist it around the pipe several times, as it gets looser (as it cuts the pipe) you retighten the clamp. You repeat this process until the pipe is cut, which takes a few minutes, but you get a really square cut (I’ve tried cutting copper pipe with a hacksaw and it’s never square)..

So I set to work cutting the 6 copper pipes that hels the basins in place. Probably took about 40 minutes including unscrwing the wasted pipe U bend thing and finally crowbaring the basins from the remaining bits of cupboard (had removed the wardrobes earlier in the week using my trusty crowbar ).

So that left me with three rooms looking like this-