After watching my father drag his 40+ year old bathroom from furnished and usable to barely stripped bare, Girlpants and I decided to take over. Mother was ushered out of the house, father was placed on bacon butty duties and we started to work - Girlpants in YMCA overalls and me in fashionable cords.

Sledgehammers and mallets at the ready, we got het up, ready for action. No holds barred, I also used the opportuntiy to advise my father of his clear inability to colour co-ordinate and style a room (whoever has heard of geometric patterned carpet in a bathroom??). So whilst my father went back downstairs to grill the bacon and lick his wounds, both of us attacked the old steel bathtub. Which refused to move. An inch. The thin chisel didn't help. A barrage of blows from the mallet just bounced off the surface, and the sledge hammer just put a bit of a ding in the side panel. Forty years of establishing itslef as the major centrepeice of the bathroom and years of fathers over enthusiastic grouting and tiling had clearly cemented the bath to the wall. Fast forward four hours later, and we had finally managed to pry it away from the wall which comically ended with my falling on my rear end, only to discover that the draft I had felt in the bathroom as a child was due to a builders inability to correctly build a solid wall without leaving gaping holes in the side. Slowly, as we starting pulling muscles that had never before existed as we carried the steel bath down the stairs and out into the back garden, I began to realise that maybe we weren't going to fit the entire bathroom in one weekend.