Biting the bullet

After more than two years of problems with our shower, and the recent failure of the structural underpinning idea, today we bit the bitter bullet and welcomed a new plumber into the house to rip out the shower tray and refit it properly.

It's quite alarming how quickly a relatively normal looking bathroom can be reduced to a building site. Within a couple of hours, the shower screen was off, the tiles had been removed from around the tray and the tray was out. We'd already sourced another box of 9 tiles from the original supplier - pretty lucky two years on! - which when added to the 5 we had left over, we calculated would be enough.

With the tray out, New Plumber was left scratching his head. Unlike every tray he'd ever seen, where they're designed to be fitted onto a level surface and the fall to the drain is moulded into the tray, THIS one required a fall to be created in the fitting surface (which explained in part why the original fitters had taken chunks out of the joists - but not why they had not given the tray enough support to prevent it from flexing).

We debated whether the tray had been supplied with a fitting kit that would have made the job easier, but at a distance of two years it was long gone, if it ever existed. There was only one sensible solution: a new tray. Which introduced its own problem: how to marry the new trap with the existing pipework for the drain, minimising the amount of disturbance to the network of hot, cold, and central heating pipework already criss-crossing the space below.

With at least a day's delay while the new tray was ordered, shipped and delivered, we resigned ourselves to being showerless until Saturday at the earliest.