Bloody Taps!

When you have a great landlord - but the road to your hell is paved with their good intentions...

And I have to say again that our landlord is a family trust and the people in it do much of the administering themselves and are fantastic people with whom it's always a pleasure to chat or assist. But as you probably know, my wife has just dodged the Big C bullet and life's been a path strewn with obstacles and dangers. And it's got around a year to go before I can start path-laying again... Here's one paver I have to deal with though...

The *&%# Tap

I'm using (or rather - sad smiley - was using) a bathtub mixer tap with integrated hand shower diverter. Because it saves water AND saves my hands. They look like this:

This is the "replacement" tap, and it's almost 2cm too wide...

And on all the standard ones the centres of the incoming water pipes are around 15cm apart, give or take 0.5cm.  This house, having been jerry-rigged by the original owners with "all the mod cons, on as cheap a budget as we can manage" such as a shower cubicle floor pan with one edge just - cut off it, so that a spare floorboard could be siliconed to it to make a bathchair-accessible step that immediately cracked and has been leaking under the floors for decades. Anyway - I digress. 

The avid homebuilder also added a hot water tap in the kitchen. 13cm away from the cold water one. Both come out of the wall rather than from the sink as is the style for kitchen sinks, so no kitchen tapset will fit. They're both too low to be useful. 

How It Saves Water:

And I want to have a bypass because also thanks to really crap home engineering, the hot water enters the house through a bare copper pipe entombed in a few cubic metres of concrete footpath, meaning the water is always wasting energy that just goes to warming the path... Also, the HWS is about 15mtrs away meaning that before the kitchen sink receives any hot water, just over 3 litres has had to be run. That's up to ten litres a day depending on dishes washed, pots rinsed, etc. 

We put that 3l into milk jugs and then through the filter jugs, and use fitered water for drinking and cooking - no waste. But the garden taps weren't even up far enough to get a milk jug under there, let alone large pots or dishes. Which brings me to the second reason I found it and bought it.

How It Saves My Hands:

I've got carpal tunnel syndrome. (Gone on too far and too long to fix by now) 

And also cold is my arch-enemy. I like to be able to turn on the tap and have warm water for washing my hands when cooking. Once I have the hot water flowing - AND a mixer tap - I can do that.

Anyway - long story short, it took me almost five years to get permission to install the tap, we had it for less than a year before the handyman wrecked it, and now I'm waiting for MY handyman to come and remove and replace the tiles that BtB seems to have gnawed holes in with a hammer and chisel, move the plumbing inside the wall to a 15cm spacing so we can fit the standard mixer tap I bought and then *finally* I'll have at least that bit of the kitchen back to useable.

Hang On - The Handyman Did It? 

I can only say these things: Both the landlord and the handyman whom I  refer to as Bob the Builder (BtB) have the same Kryptonite - plumbing. Oh - not the routing of pipework or siting of fittings - just the actual, you know, making it hold water without leaking...

And so it was no surprise that when BtB fitted my mixer tap, it leaked significantly. But what happened next was still not even his fault. He went outside, shut off the water main, came inside and undid the leaking fitting(s, as it turns out, because both the hot and cold water leaked) and re-doped them with new teflon tape, had just attached the hot side and . . . time for a small digression:

The house on that side of us has been sold and the new owner is a carpenter/builder, and has been pulling siding off, wall linings inside, anything that the old place has had fail in its last thirty - forty years. And on this day he had his 14yo son working with him. And the boy was thirsty and needed water but their water had been turned off because so many sections of house plumbing were out of Code. What to do? What to do? 

As it turned out What To Do was apparently go to our outside tap, realise that the water main was turned off, and turn it back on so he could slake his thirst. BtB roared at the little ass, his father roared more expletives than I thought were possible on a worksite, the water got turned off again, and BtB went back inside.

But it was that little bit too much. BtB isn't a young man, and he was rattled, so he overtightened the cold side of the tap and broke the retaining nut. The only part that's custom-made for that tap, permanently fitted so once it's broken it can't be replaced, and - just like that - its six month reign was over. I was disgusted enough that I tossed it on next door's rubble truck making sure Dad the Di.. Look, I'll just call him DtD,okay? ...made sure that DtD saw it, but you know what? Not one word of apology from him, no offer to make good what at its core was caused by StD (Son the..etc) or anything. 

I as observed bought a new tap that was similar, but forgot that when I'd bought the original, it had taken me a lot of effort to locate one that had 13.5cm spacing rather than the standard 15cm. So I bought the best value for money and it's a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. But because BtB cut the new sheetrock and the tiles to centre on 13.5cm, not even the offsetting fittings could save the situation. Also, BtB has used a shortcut with the old tap and in the process removed a critical thread diameter piece that's buried way inside where all the sheetrock and tiles would need to be removed - and we have only three spare tiles. 

Today a friend and also paid handyman is coming in his professional capacity and we'll solve the problem somehow, and never speak a word to the landlord of BtB. Unless they read my publications, that is...

So - That's It Then, Yeah?

Ummm no. The new extractor fan, that's another thing. The electricians thoughtfully took the old one out and promised to come back to replace it and install a light ASAP (as in, right after Easter) and finally showed up out of the blue last week when I wasn't even home an hour after having an overnight procedure at the hospital, my wife was finally able to sit in the lounge room after her last chemo, and we had another visitor that also couldn't really afford to get casually infected with any community pathogen. 

After telling them to actually MAKE AN APPOINTMENT NEXT TIME they just decided to leave us hanging for more than a week I'm pretty sure I'll have to call them to book another time. At least one of us has some sense of doing business right... 😸

Maybe now you can see why I'm actually literally truly a bundle of nerves right now. I startle at the slightest noise (and with DtD and StD and various other workers ripping into the house and taking truckloads of rubble away almost daily that's a lot of ruffled fur here and not all of it being our three cats' now Dr Furgatroyd's... )

Okay - thanks for your company today, please share the URL with friends or your social group, and if you can hit one of the donation links. It'll let me use the donations for the publications and online costs, and put what I've been slicing off my pension into bringing our emergency jar back to where it was before paying several hundred dollars for the original tap, the new tap, the fittings for the new tap, and the cost on my own handyman. (Because I won't trust BtB with this after the performance...)

Our Emergency Jar isn't *quite* "tapped" yet.

Please help.