Stef or Glory

The bathroom has increasingly not been a nice place to be.



The problems are twofold, the skylight leaks when it rains (we had taken the ceiling down around the skylight to see if there was anything we could do but it was just basically rubbish):

and when it got cold huge amounts of condensation formed on the metal deck that forms the roof of the bathroom (it is under the front deck) and percolated down through the rockwool insulation (making it nice and damp) and into the plywood ceiling. There was a moisture barrier in the form of plastic sheet, but it had cleverly had lots of holes cut in it by the previous owners for various reasons (eg. putting speakers into the ceiling) and was only stapled on in sections anyway, so it wasn't actually providing a barrier to any moisture at all.


There are plans afoot to replace the skylight with a vastly improved new one (more of that later) but to fix the condensation problem we needed to rip the whole room apart, re-insulate, and build it back better. This was a situation that called for famous London Rollergirl Stefanie Mainey, so i put in the call and she turned up, grabbed a hammer and started smashing up everything in sight.

Between us we ripped out all the walls and ceiling, helped considerably by the fact that it was all really shoddily built.


Hardly any of the battens was actually fixed in place, they were just wedged in between the ribs, and the insulation fell right out as soon as the plastic was pulled away. We also discovered that part of the problem with condensation was that as the battens were wedged between the protruding ribs that span across the metal roof, those ribs were touching the plywood ceiling itself, and providing a thermal bridge which caused massive condensation. Also, as i mentioned, the vapour barrier wasn't providing a barrier to anything, and the insulation was poor quality, thin and patchy.




Stef and I worked hard all afternoon, and by the end of the day we had a huge pile of rockwool, wood and plastic



and a bare metal ceiling and walls.




To be honest it require a certain amount of imagination to see this as an improvement, but just because we hadn't been able to see the rust and much before didn't mean it wasn't there, and at least now we could see it, treat it, and make it better.

To be continued...