Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread

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I advise anyone, never under any circumstances, take up some abandoned bathroom project. So you would assume l would have learnt my lesson wouldn’t you? Have I hell. l spend most of my life fixing other plumbers’ mistakes. This time it was builder pretending he could fit a bathroom. This luxury bathroom was a classic. It was a hairs breath away from being totally ripped out, a because of the way the builder had installed it. So bad were the mistakes it was unused for two years. The builder, if you can call him that, dropped the ball. He forgot to install the waste for the £1300 main vanity unit and basin. It was put in the floor rather than the wall. The bathroom was complete and tiled before he realised the error, that the sink could not be used. But that was the tip of the iceberg. Everything was wrong: from the installing of the tray, shower and toilet, to the tiles and the trim. The shower was a cold trickle, blocked with debris from the install. Key tile edges were butchered with a stone cutter, rather than than using a proper cutter (mine cost £360 not some £50 version in B&Q). The tray and screen were unsealed, the tile grout lines were wrong, the trims where put on last not first. The trims were £2-a-strip white plastic. The owner wanted black metal. The toilet moved, it was not grouted underneath and the fixings were broken. The soil stack outside was a mess and would have leaked, but for the cement the builder had flushed down. Oh and tray waste leaked when the shower turned on and impossible to reach. The seal was clogged with silicone when it should have had none. An access had to be cut in another room and the new specialist Mira waste took a month to arrive. Any use of the shower would have brought the ceiling down. For the sake of the lovely couple, l had to put it right. And nine days of work, later, it is. But let this be a lesson to those thinking of a new bathroom install. Check out the installer. If they have no website, or the work looks wrong, stay clear. In life there are no short cuts. Bathrooms are complex jigsaws. And a dream can quickly become a nightmare.