Gone.

Gone. That tatty, awful bathroom - gone.

Here are a few more photographs to remind ourselves just how tragic it was.

Funnily enough, sometimes when I look at photos of the toilet, it doesn't appear quite as bad as I remember it. But then I didn't take a snapshot of down the toilet bowl.

I scrubbed and scrubbed this bath, but it just would not come clean. Years of neglect sometimes just can't be erased. Without a sledgehammer.

For a while we contemplated keeping the shower. We must have been barking mad. It worked, and that was the reason for not replacing it. Mother-in-law bought us one as a house-warming gift, so that put paid to the terrible idea of keeping it. When the plumbers removed it, it was days away from death anyway.

The old bar heater. Beautiful. Or not.

You can just see my toes peeping out here on the foulest carpet ever stepped on. See the discolouration near the toilet bowl and the skirting. Shall we not imagine what that could be?

Ah. Gone. Gone. Gone. The dirt. The carpet. All of it. Gone.

Thank. Goodness.

Out with the old...

With enormous relief, ripping out the bathroom was first on our agenda. We did have to shower in there for a couple of weeks – but there was no way H was going to bathe in that tub, so a little baby IKEA bath served us very well in the interim.

First things first, we had to get our hands dirty – tearing out the filthy blue carpet. I still cannot get my head around carpets in the bathroom, especially up the side of the bath.

It was revolting pulling it up, the thought of all those years of baths and showers and toilet use on the carpet. Shudder. The dust and debris and smell were repellent.

Once we had cleared the space it was time to call in the big guns. Fred and John – our plumbers – took a sledge hammer to that cast iron bath tub. Apparently that is the best way to remove it, meaning less risk of damaging the walls by trying to manoeuvre the whole thing down the staircase.

Just a couple of days later the old and tatty had been decimated. And the way paved for the new and beautiful and clean.