While cleaning the bathroom, I slipped and fell, and in the process I smashed my foot into the apron panel on the side of the bathtub, breaking it. I ended up cutting the sole of my foot, had to stop the bleeding with a lot of tissues, and then rushed to a pharmacy just before closing that night to buy a large adhesive bandage.
My foot would heal with time, but the broken bathtub apron wouldn’t. Unfortunately, the apron panel alone couldn’t be replaced, and even after contacting repair contractors, I was told that fixing just the apron wasn’t possible. As a result, I ended up having to renovate the entire bathroom.
Takara Standard “Granspa”
Since I live in a condominium, I asked the property management company’s renovation department to arrange an estimate. The bathroom manufacturer was Takara Standard. I chose a standard model, and the base price for the entire bathroom unit was 673,000 yen. Including construction costs and consumption tax, the total came to 1,473,000 yen. After a small discount on the odd amount, I signed the contract for 1,450,000 yen.
Going to a Public Bath During Construction
The construction period ended up lasting about half a month. The actual work took only four days, but because I wasn’t often at home on weekdays, scheduling stretched it out to roughly two weeks.
During the construction, I couldn’t use the bath at home, so I had to go to a public bath instead. There wasn’t one nearby, so I had to take a bus to get there. On top of that, the last bus ran fairly early, which meant I had to visit the public bath earlier in the evening than I normally would.
The New Bathroom Feels Great
Once the work was finished and everything was brand new, I could finally enjoy bathing again. The new bathroom is designed to prevent dirt from building up, and the drain makes it much easier to remove hair, so it’s far easier to keep everything clean.
I enjoy bringing my Kindle into the bath to read, so I was happy to have my bath-time reading routine back.
Breaking the bathtub and having to replace the entire bathroom wasn’t ideal, but since it had been over 20 years since I moved into the condominium when it was new, perhaps it was a good thing that the replacement happened before a more serious problem occurred.
