Bathroom Reno Part 2 – Toilet

The second part to the great bathroom renovation was our little toilet closet.  Quite the norm by European standards but it freaked me out for the first while I was here.   It literally is a closet just big enough for me and my toilet.

The weirdest thing for me in the beginning was the toilet shelf.  If you’ve never been to this part of Europe you probably would have never experienced it, and that’s not a bad thing.   I never did take any photos of our old toilet, probably because I was embarrassed and disgusted by it.   I didn’t want anyone to know I had a toilet with an observation deck.

Here are some photos I pulled off the net to show you what I mean.

Here, you see?  A shelf.  I really wasn’t kidding.

You don’t notice anything really abnormal about it until your first poo, then it hits you.   That’s the moment when you get the full impact of the toilet observation shelf.

Your poo is sitting there in a pile, ripe and ready for your inspection.  For me, this wasn’t really necessary… but I guess there are circumstances where it comes in handy.  For example, if you were a drug smuggler or if you have a child who is in the habit of eating things he shouldn’t and one day he gets his hands on your wedding rings.   I prefer to think that these are the things the Dutch had in mind when they brought these toilets into play.  Not that they just enjoy being able to inspect their feces regularly.

The above photo shows you the difference between a normal toilet and the observation shelf toilet.  Apparently they have them in Germany too because I know the word Flachspueler isn’t Dutch, at least I don’t think it is.

In any case, you get what I’m saying.

The Dutch are very good about giving you handy tips about the toilet shelf though.   When I first arrived here and commented about the odd toilets, one cloggy was kind enough to tell me that if you put toilet paper on the shelf before having a poo, it flushes away easier.  Good to know!

So, in renovating our toilet room… the toilet observation shelf was the first to go!  My poo was to be hidden in a pool of murky toilet water an paper where it belonged.

I didn’t take a ‘before’ photo of our toilet but I did remember to start snapping photos part way through.   Probably due to the excitement that the old toilet was gone.

At this point the toilet was out and we had ripped out the ugly yellow tiles (the same as the ones that were in the shower). We had also started building the wooden frame to build in the pipes.

Oh yeah that’s another thing I forgot to mention.  Here the pipes are all outside the wall, again – probably practical.  Still though, it’s BUTT UGLY.  So in both the shower and the toilet we had them put into the wall.

Some plastering, new tiles, new walls and a NEW NO-SHELF TOILET later, this is the final result.

That shelf now has a basket of toilet paper and a few reading materials sitting on it, but otherwise it all looks mostly the same.  There’s not much more I can really say about it, I mean it’s a toilet.   I guess it’s a much more pleasant place to poo now…  especially now that I don’t have to look at it!