OK - I promise this will be the last post on our cottage renovations for a while!!
But I thought I would share our story because when we researched this on the internet we could find no helpful advice about getting a cast iron bath down a steep narrow staircase
A Cast Iron Story
How to get a cast iron bath down the stairs in an old cottage with no room to manouvre at the top of the stairs
One of the hardest jobs we've had to do in the cottage was to take out the cast iron bath. It was a hideous thing, I never liked it!!! It was ok for a while because we had it resurfaced when we first moved to the cottage, but after seven years it needed to be resurfaced again and it's very expensive to do, so it had to go!
Getting it out, though, was another matter. It weighed 150 kg. Hubby and I struggled to lift it (upright) to the top of the stairs but once there we had a job to hold it. Somehow we had to get it into a sliding position without actually letting it go, which would have caused untold damage to the newly plastered stair walls and door frames. It was impossible with just the two of us and no room to manouvre. Friends came round to help, but four of us could not do it because of the angles at the top of the stairs. It had to be lifted back to the bathroom. At the end of day one we were no further along
After researching how to break up a cast iron bath, hubby didn't fancy the idea. It was the reports of nasty accidents, deafness, blindness and shards of razor sharp cast iron flying around the bathroom like bullets that put him off. He also worried that if the bath didn't break up completely, we would be left with trying to remove the bath in one piece, just as heavy, but with lethally sharp razor edges to boot. No way!
We had a sleepless night
Hubby came up with an ingenious plan
Up early, no sleep, he ordered some 13 foot long scaffold boards which came straight away, thank you! He placed the boards at the top of the stairs and out the front door. This made the gradient less steep. He stabilised the bath with a runner. We added my Laura Ashley rug to the top of the scaffold boards to stop the bath slipping too fast. He nailed a batten half way down the scaffold boards so the bath could only slip half way (to control the speed)
It was scary how heavy this bath was. I had visions of it taking out the whole of the stair walls on both sides, so I moved the furniture and pictures five feet away from both walls!!!
Fortunuately, I had the forethought to make sure we had a mobile phone upstairs and begged him to put a ladder to one of the windows
Back upstairs, hubby and I struggled again with the weight of the bath. We managed to lift it to the top of the stairs again. I tried to hold it while he tried to lift it on an angle at the top of the stairs but we weren't strong enough. Mobile phone upstairs? Yes! A phone call and a very good friend came round. Between us, the three of us managed to get it at the right angle to start it sliding and, yay, it slid very slowly half way down and stopped at the batten! Ladder at the window? Yes! Both men climbed out the window
By now, I'm feeling some RELIEF and some SHOCK that I still have a staircase (remember that the cottage is 200 years old with original floorboards). They were able to get the other side of the bath. Hubby removed the batten and the bath very slowly slid the rest of the way down the stairs and straight out the door!
Once it was outside I started to love it. Oh yes!
Look at these gorgeous rust patterns and colours
I noticed lots of interesting stripes for A Year of Colour (July)
... and then I took some rubbings of the letters and numbers - oh joy!
We were so tired at the end of this day, no sleep, two days of heavy lifting, two hours of cleaning up the mess and putting the furniture back. We went out to The Lifeboat to celebrate a very satisfying day!
