I don’t know what showers are like in prison, but if you wanted punishment to extend to the bathroom, you would have the bathtub fixtures our Pennsylvania-based landlady gave the go-ahead to replace. Our 69-year-old neighborhood plumber showed up again to do the work, and we had another long day of mechanical adventure: cutting, sawing, soldering, taping, tightening, and losing small parts.
The hot water flow to the bathtub was down to just a trickle. Never very strong, it had gotten weaker over time, due to mineral deposits inside the fixture. He’d told me he had a nice set of faucets to put on, something ordered for a customer who’d changed his mind. When he got out of his truck with premium Moen unit, I was ecstatic. Heavy cast metal! Little Euro-levers! Did I mention heavy cast metal? And a HUGE shower head…
He was more or less giving this away for the cost of a new cheapo set, but when we got all the pieces out, two essential fittings were missing. We looked and looked, but couldn’t find them. Naturally whatever was missing was not a standard item. “And I never even opened the box before…” he said. So off he went to buy something else we could use, promising to see if there was anything like the Moen available. I knew there wouldn’t be and felt like my team had lost the big game. But it wasn’t even my house, and he had a job to do. I wasn’t in a position to specify high-end fixtures for a rental, especially a funky “Old Taos” adobe. Besides, if the shower really worked, and if I didn’t have to go read a book while the bathtub filled up, it might be worth it, no mattter what the faucets looked like.
I suffered in the usual way. Maybe this is what you tell yourself to keep from the mortifying conclusion that once again, you left things to chance instead of speaking up for what you really wanted. I could have had him order the exact same thing at the regular price, for example, and made up the difference myself. I could have improved the property at my own expense just for the pleasure of using heavy cast metal Euro-handles in a bathroom with cobweb-covered cement blocks visible behind the rough-cut hanging boards meant to dull the pain, so to speak. I could have done that, but it would have been too much against the flow, no pun intended.
Sure enough, he came back with a shiny cheapo unit made in China. Instead of a single heavy casting, the guts were little brass tubes soldered into fittings. It looked like it would last a year. I didn’t say anything, but my disappointment must have been obvious.
The work proceeded. I don’t know how he did it, operating in a tiny space inside the wall behind the bathtub. Tools of every description were scattered all over the floor. He had to use a big electric saw to make enough space to turn a wrench. After installing the cheapo unit from China and discovering that a tiny washer deep inside was malformed and defective, he rummaged around in an old yellow plastic container full of hundreds of little packages and loose junk until he found a replacement. Inserting the washer and a tiny spring dangling on the end of a screwdriver into the dark depths behind the wall took at least two dozen tries and almost an hour.
Finally it came time to replace the shower head. I’d been dying a slow death while all this was going on, playing with the chintzy new one and wishing it bigger in my hands. It looked worse than what was coming off, in fact. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I’d hang onto the old one, soak it in vinegar, and hope I could clean it out, I thought to myself — if I could actually get it to work, I’d put it back on later. Just then I heard, “You know, I can put on the shower head from the other unit,” he said, and went out to his truck to get it.
Yippee!
It may sound trivial to you, but now we have a nice Moen shower head that soaks my whole head and body all at once. The bathtub fills up in minutes, too. You live without these things long enough, you freeze and grumble and make do, and then suddenly you’re a real person again.
It kind of wakes you up, you know?
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Here in Oz we install showerheads to REDUCE the flow of water … we have to save water, you see. They’re quite nice though. The spray of water is just finer.
All North American plumbing has been flow-limited for years, too. Probably not as rationed as yours is. But the old fixtures here were really sad, and we had almost no hot water.
Anyway, this isn’t about plumbing! You know that.
“Little things” DO mean a LOT!!!
Considering all the awful stuff we’ve been through, the instant poverty that moving here effected, the ghastly rental situation, the freezing cold, the mud, the tottering esteem, and overall outrageousness, YES, a freaking nice showerhead and hot water that works is something like a thunderclap.