this is my ever ongoing super Mario wc. we have a few children of various ages and my wife and I are keen gamers.

some of the work was born of necessity but most admittedly was pure folly!

as I am a plumber by trade I was able to reuse nearly all the bits and bobs. wood, paint etc. was purchased locally with much mirth from the counter staff.

the floor was done professionally by a joiner friend of mine using offcuts of laminate flooring he had from an old job.

Step 1: Super Mario Wc

after years of putting up with damp walls and no hand wash provision in the "smallest room" I decided to take things into my own hands. (despite being a renter)

my first step was to stick polystyrene backed plaster board (button board) to all the walls and bring some water pipes down for a radiator and a hot, cold and waste through from the kitchen on the other side of wall.

this should stop the condensation caused by the two cold exterior walls and would allow me to cover the electric cables left on the surface by the electricians.

I haven't taken pictures of these steps as they were pretty pedestrian things and not very appealing.

Step 2: Painting and Experimenting

we have two step toilet seats installed to allow for toddlers (of which more later) and anyone with a small bottom to sit on. unfortunately whilst steaming off the wall paper I left the wand on the seat and it instantly "blew" the m.d.f.

this necessitated a repair and whilst I was at it I thought the new lid would make a great 1up mushroom. with a little scouting around on tinternet I found a lot of variations which looked good and I gathered it doesn't have to be perfect just as well as the spirit gets captured.

an old radiator was taken from a skip and was painted in rustproof paint several times before being painted as near to the original Mario colours as I could get. the paint i used was waterbased emulsion tester pots and many coats of varnish once I was happy with it. the circles in the corners proved to be the hardest to paint as radiators aren't flat, I got over this by tracing around coins.

as I ran the pipework up the wall in copper I thought it might be fun to put a toilet paper holder off the pipes. this was an added bonus and also gives us the ludicrous benefit of warm toilet paper.

to finish the pipes I painted them the correctish shade of green and varnished them thoroughly. I also found a new gate valve in my van and bought a thermostatic radiator valve which I painted up as a piranha plant (unsuccessfully)

bizarrely enough the corner hand basin kept coming off the wall. I stuck it several times with various mastics but every night it would be off the wall. the mystery was finally solved when I caught my little toddler trying to pull herself up on the lip of the basin. battens were glued underneath the basin and a temporary splashback was added above to secure the basin. the toddler was fed to a piranha plant.

Step 3: New to Me Wc

a second hand back to wall pan was sourced and the cistern was stripped and modernised internally with quiet fill valve and button flush. the 9 liter flush was left intact however and is accessed by holding down the button rather than just pressing it.

as I am a plumber by trade this step was pretty straight forward for me whereas I really struggled with the plasterboard and I'm still not happy with the finish in places.

to do the door I built little replicas before starting, to make sure the effect would be similar to the mid level castle doors in the game even though the scale is completely wrong. after the brown gloss was dry my wife and I marked out for the black lines which we pained in matt black. we used the same technique on the toilet boxing to create the Mario bricks.

lastly I screwed some timber slats to the door painted with gloss black paint and used some toilet fixing washers from my van to add the white bumps.

this is my favourite part of the room as I think its turned out really fun and is easily recognizable from the game.