Since I decided to stay in China for another year, I wanted to make my life a bit more comfortable. Ever since I arrived here, I have hated my bathroom. I have showered in it less than 10 times total over the past 8 months. I found that showering at the bath house was cheap and the facilities were quite nice. This worked well for a while until my schedule started getting more and more complicated. When there was no longer time to spend several hours at the bath house every day, I realised that not using my bathroom was far less than ideal.

There were a few things that really bothered me about the bathroom.

1. The toilet had no stagnant water in the bowl. Mosquitoes would thus fly into the room from the sewer system below
2. There was a water heater mounted above the sink which made it impossible to mount a mirror that I could use when shaving.
3. The water heater was too small. There would be no hot water about 3/4 of the way through a long shower.
4. There were rusting pipes running all over the bathroom. They looked horrible, leaked constantly, and couldn’t be good health wise. Paint chips kept coming off which clogged the drain
5. The sink didn’t drain well and water came out of the tap too slowly. The temperature control was either too cold or too hot. There was no middle temperature
6. There was no drain for the washing machine. Whenever a cycle was done, the water would spill out all over the floor and about half would drain into the shower’s drain hole while half would just sit in the area next to the toilet. The mosquitoes would gravitate towards this stagnant water that wouldn’t drain
7. The shower drain wasn’t big enough. Water would pool up and take forever to drain
8. The tiles were all old dirty, cracked, and just plain ugly
9. The ceiling had begun to mildew
10. The shower head wasn’t mounted high enough. I am fairly tall, and thus couldn’t rinse my hair without bending at the waist.
11. The washing machine had to be moved into the shower area each time we did a load so that the drain hose could be routed towards the shower’s drain hole. The machine then had to be moved back to the other side of the room when I wanted to shower.
12. The glass that connected to the kitchen was broken
13. There was no enclosed shower area. Water would get all over the place and thus caused me to track it all over the house when I left the shower. If I had to go back and brush my teeth, I would then get more water on my shoes that I would track outside the bathroom

Anyway, I know that seems like a long list, and that some of the things seem minor, but all those little things when factored together really frustrated me.

I decided that since I would be here another year that I wanted to have a bathroom I felt more comfortable using. I asked Ivy from Konall to help me find some contractors to bid the job. She said that everone she called turned down the job because it was too small. There was only one person who responded. He bid 7800 RMB for the job, and we ultimately got him to take it for 6500 RMB (about $800 US).

I was a bit nervous about not having a bathroom for the 10 days that it would take to remodel the bathroom, and didn’t like the idea of having laborers constantly working in my house, but I bit the bullet and signed a contract.

10 minutes after agreeing on the terms, there were 7 works scouring over my bathroom. They quickly started destroying all the old tile, removing the appliances, and getting rid of everything that wasn’t permanently installed. They didn’t bother about checking for electrical lines or plumbing, but just started hacking away.

By the end of the first day, everything had been gutted and all you could see were the original pipes and concrete.

I didn’t want to sleep at home without any water or a toilet, so I decided to look for a hotel. The cheapest one that met my desired quality was over 200 RMB ($25 US) a night, which I thought was too expensive. I decided to try sleeping at the bath house. I knew that all the bath houses had rooms that you could sleep in, but I had never tried it. I went to 龙世界 (lóng shìjiè) and got a room. It was REALLY nice and only ran me 30 RMB a night ($3.75 US). Score!

My house was already a TOTAL mess and I was really starting to have second thoughts about the whole process….