Bathroom Wall

lindze

I live in a ground floor flat in a converted Victorian house, main building cavity walls. My bathroom is a one storey extension off the kitchen.

I am looking to upgrade the bathroom, but as it is tight for space, I have paid it a bit more attention recently.

The doorway into the bathroom – then a slight step down, to the left of the step is what seems to be a hollow wall around 2ft deep and then the bath runs alongside this wall. How would I best find out why this wall is so deep? If I tap it, it all sounds hollow. If I could gain even a ft of space and move the bath over it could make a great deal of difference.

It seems such a waste of space to me and so I would like to find out what’s behind there without causing too much damage (so the current bath is still useable)?

I am a bit worried about what lurks there as I know that it was converted in the 1990’s by pretty much cowboys…. everything we touch turns into a much bigger and expensive job!

Doozergirl

A picture speaks a thousand words

Can you post a link to a picture hosted elsewhere?

lindze

Doozergirl wrote: »

A picture speaks a thousand words

Can you post a link to a picture hosted elsewhere?

Ah yes, good point!



I will take some pictures when I get home from work

lindze

https://www.flickr.com/photos/186343692@N05/

Hopefully this works! Please excuse the grotty bathroom

Doozergirl

It does look like they've boxed it off to fit the bath in square.

Is there anything that you can prise open to get behind? Otherwise if you're doing the whole room, it wouldn't do much harm to smash a bit of a hole in it with a hammer and shine a torch or your phone camera in there.

Even if you don't end up ripping it out, you can patch it up by tiling over or plastering a patch back in.

It sounds like it's worth looking. I have a 'thing' about baths that have a corner sticking into the room, so do tend to create boxing for people to keep it neat, but it's always storage of some description - whether it's recesses or a cupboard.

lindze

Thank you, you know it hadn't even occurred to me that it could be to make the bath fit square! I think it's definitely worth investigating as it's such a small room but how wonky can a wall be..eek!
Ideally I would like the bath on a different wall, but unfortunately they made the extension an L shape (with the loo in the short part of the L) with no other wall long enough to fit a bath...terrible design and executed pretty badly.
The last discovery was no lintel above the back door, when pulling off plastic trim that was just glued to the wall to hide the pretty large air gap, so I'm always nervous when investigating anything in this place as you never know what bodge you'll find underneath

lindze

I've uploaded a pic of the door...just so you can see what workmanship I'm dealing with here
Thank you for your help, I'm going to make some inspection holes and see what I find (hopefully nothing sinister)

Doozergirl

lindze wrote: »

I've uploaded a pic of the door...just so you can see what workmanship I'm dealing with here
Thank you for your help, I'm going to make some inspection holes and see what I find (hopefully nothing sinister)

Oh wow. That's bad

lindze

Yep, this is what gives me the fear. They just hid stuff like this all over the place.
Well let's see whats behind the wall and fix what's either there, or more worrying, what's not there! :eek:

PasturesNew

When you find the body ... don't touch it. Just call the police.

lindze

We have discussed the possibility of finding a body in there! It's plenty big enough