The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 2: The Plumbing

And in case you missed the first part - the hilarious and heart-warming story of the pigeon which got stuck up our chimney - you can catch up here.

Monday was our 6-month anniversary in the new flat - I think it's safe to say that we feel pretty well at home here now (though it took longer than I thought it would), but one thing that has been the bane of our lives - and I can't believe we actually managed to put up with it for 6 months - has been the barely-functioning shower. The bathroom is small - when the flats were built, around 1902 - the bathroom, well toilet I should say, was in an outhouse out back. Anyway this means there is not much room and the vendors took out the bath and installed a shower cubicle - ie there is no other means of washing, apart from a flannel in the washbasin and water all over the floor. The bathroom was one of the last rooms the vendors did up before selling on the flat, and it is barely a year old - when I first saw the flat, it looked far too glamorous for us, with stone and tile and mirrors everywhere and a shower like you might expect to find in a 5-star hotel.

They warned us about the fact that when you turn it on, you have to run it for a goodly while before enough water started to flow to actually shower in. To start with this meant running it for about 10 minutes, but gradually it got worse, meaning we often needed to leave it running for half an hour before enough water was flowing to wash in. I hated the waste of water. And even once it did start flowing, it kept cutting to a heavy flow of cold water, which meant you had to leap out of the way and squeeze into the corner of the cubicle, until it started flowing warm again. For a while this was preceded by a noise in the pipes - an increase in pressure or something I suppose - which forewarned you that the cold was coming, a bit like the noise the Fireswamp makes in The Princess Bride before it incinerates you.

Basically after a few months of this, the hot water stopped flowing all together and turned into a dribble, which alternated with a heavy flow of cold water. For a moment when the hot dribble turned into cold flow or vice versa there would be a flow of hot water, for about a millisecond, which is when you could rinse shampoo or conditioner from your hair - though I am not sure it ever really got properly wet!

And that is how we have been washing ourselves for the last few months, often ending up leaving late for work as it has taken so long to have a shower in the morning. And this is not for want of trying to get it fixed. The most frustrating thing about it all has been the difficulty of getting a plumber to come and look at it, to diagnose the problem, and of course we had no clue - the frustration of learning what you don't know about when you own a place... I made contact, one way or another, with about 5 different plumbers, got 5 different opinions on what the problem was, made arrangements to come and look at it which were never honoured. I learnt that the good plumbers don't need to call you back, because they have no shortage of work. The recommendation from our old neighbour Sue of Martin the Polish Plumber eventually paid off - but having called, texted and emailed, when I finally succeeded in speaking to him, he was about to head to Poland for the summer!

In the end, he was here until 10pm last night, and touch wood, it now seems to be working. You turn the shower on and - miracle of miracles! - water comes out and it's hot and it keeps coming out and it stays hot! The problem was differential pressures for the hot water (coming from the mains) and the cold water (coming from a tank in the roof), and he tried a series of things until one of them worked. Counter-intuitively a pressure-reducing valve for the hot, to try to level out the pressure - and then simplest of all solutions, installing a brand-new shower and tap which were suited for low water pressure. It seems the vendors had installed high pressure taps.

Sorry to go on about this, but it has been a real nightmare, and stupidly difficult to get sorted out! But hopefully normal life can now resume, and we can turn our thoughts to all the other things we want to do in the flat that we haven't been thinking about with the part of our brains consumed by shower frustration - like putting up some pictures!