Plumbing problems

I’ll start by saying I hate house maintenance. I hate the amount of time it takes to do it and I hate it even more when I have to call a tradesperson in.

At the beginning of the year I noticed water appearing in my bathroom after having a shower where it shouldn’t have appeared. I knew in my gut that something was wrong but I buried my head in the sand and hoped it would go away. My years of life experience should have told me that this wouldn’t work and I called a plumber to fix my taps. Him and his apprentice dropped in on their way to another job and were so rushed that they fixed the taps – kind of. Water was still leaking out from behind the cold tap when the shower was on.

This problem got worse when I could hear the sound of water running through pipes when there were no taps on at all. I decided not to call the same plumber and instead called a friend of a friend who’s a plumber. He came out a couple of weeks ago, I explained what was going on and he eventually decided that there was water leaking behind the tiles. This meant taking some tiles off the wall.

Sure enough, water was leaking from the pipe behind the tiles.

The pictures below show how he had to leave it for the weekend until he had the time and the parts to fix the pipe. The bit of board is to channel the water into the shower and away from the wall.

Fortunately there is a shower we can use over the bath which happens to be adjacent to this so we weren’t without the availability of washing ourselves over the weekend.

He came back on the Monday and fixed the leak, put two new taps on the shower and put a plastic bag over the hole so we can use that shower again.

Now I can have a shower and not have to use all my strength to turn the taps off so they don’t leak. I like that, and it wasn’t too expensive.

The next part is fixing the wall though. I found out that behind the tiles where waterproof board should have been used, it wasn’t. The gyprock there has pretty much disintegrated and it turns out that the whole shower’s back wall will need replacing. I haven’t received the quote for that yet but the good news is that insurance should cover it. Phew!

The whole bathroom is quite dated and I’d dearly love to gut the whole lot and get it redone but I’d rather go on a holiday than do that. I need a holiday!

In other news, completely non-related to leaking showers, I’ve been trying Fairtrade chocolate.