So last winter, my landlord demolished my old bathroom and put in a brand new one, giving me ample opportunity to redecorate it in a way I felt was more fitting to my tastes. I really love the way it looks and feels and am generally pleased with the entire effort, but lately, one thing has begun to drive me crazy, and that's the shower. Now, it was a tad frustrating when I first bought the new shower curtains and found that the new shower ring is far lower than the old one, meaning that the curtains are far too big both inside and out. Maybe one of these days I'll get them properly adjusted. But this is an inconvenience that I have since learned to live with. Sure, it's annoying to have half the bathtub filled with the overflow of the shower curtain liners, but I can live with it. At least for the time being. One of these days I'll dismount them and cut them down to the proper size. Or so I've said for the past 6 months or so and still haven't accomplished this task. In the meantime, I've just come to live with this minor annoyance.
Now my major source of annoyance has become the bathtub faucet. It seemed to work very well when everything was all done and ready for use. I had excellent water pressure and aside from my dislike of the shower head that to me doesn't sufficiently provide enough water for my liking, it was OK. I could live with it. Sure, the new shower head is not adjustable like my old one was, which had a massage option as well as a standard shower option and a few other things to boot, but oh, well, I could live with it. But now the faucet has begun to malfunction. During a recent shower, the cold water pressure quit and I was scalded by very hot water. Fortunately, I reacted quickly and turned everything off. I was able to resume my shower after fiddling with the spigots to get them to pump out equal parts hot and cold water so I could take a pleasantly warm shower instead of a scalding hot one. It had been the hot water spigot that was quitting on me, but to my dismay, I now found that the cold water spigot was doing the exact same thing. So now, they are both malfunctioning and although my landlord came over to look at it, he wasn't willing to replace the faucet and instead just jury rigged it enough to make it work - sort of. He said that the faucet wasn't replaceable, which I know darn well it is. I suspect he just didn't want to take apart the entire shower assembly to do the job since he also had a plumbing repair to do in my kitchen that same day. So he sort of fixed it, but now it's on the fritz again, so now my landlord is finally willing to replace the faucet entirely, something he should have done in the first place.
It really drives me crazy how, instead of fixing things the first time and doing it right, my landlord is always jury rigging things and then later, he has to spend more money to actually repair things. Why not spend the money the first time and fix whatever is broken rather than buying a bunch of cheap materials to "sort of" repair something and hope it holds instead of just going to the hardware store and getting the materials to replace something that is not working properly? I mean, I waited years, literally years, for the new bathroom while the old one continued to crumble and he kept sort of fixing things and telling me what a hassle it would be to replace them. In the end, he ended up having to replace all of the fixtures (save the bathtub, which he wanted to get rid of entirely and replace with a tiny box of a shower stall - no thank you! I demanded that the tub be kept, no matter how much room it takes up in my tiny closet of a bathroom!). So what good did it do to delay the inevitable? Sure, it may have saved him a few bucks over the space of time, and maybe if I owned this place I might think a little differently, but I have always been of the opinion that you do a job right the first time so that you don't have to go back later and do it again, thus saving you time
and money. But maybe I am a bit old fashioned in my ways of thinking these days......
So last winter, my landlord demolished my old bathroom and put in a brand new one, giving me ample opportunity to redecorate it in a way I felt was more fitting to my tastes. I really love the way it looks and feels and am generally pleased with the entire effort, but lately, one thing has begun to drive me crazy, and that's the shower. Now, it was a tad frustrating when I first bought the new shower curtains and found that the new shower ring is far lower than the old one, meaning that the curtains are far too big both inside and out. Maybe one of these days I'll get them properly adjusted. But this is an inconvenience that I have since learned to live with. Sure, it's annoying to have half the bathtub filled with the overflow of the shower curtain liners, but I can live with it. At least for the time being. One of these days I'll dismount them and cut them down to the proper size. Or so I've said for the past 6 months or so and still haven't accomplished this task. In the meantime, I've just come to live with this minor annoyance.
Now my major source of annoyance has become the bathtub faucet. It seemed to work very well when everything was all done and ready for use. I had excellent water pressure and aside from my dislike of the shower head that to me doesn't sufficiently provide enough water for my liking, it was OK. I could live with it. Sure, the new shower head is not adjustable like my old one was, which had a massage option as well as a standard shower option and a few other things to boot, but oh, well, I could live with it. But now the faucet has begun to malfunction. During a recent shower, the cold water pressure quit and I was scalded by very hot water. Fortunately, I reacted quickly and turned everything off. I was able to resume my shower after fiddling with the spigots to get them to pump out equal parts hot and cold water so I could take a pleasantly warm shower instead of a scalding hot one. It had been the hot water spigot that was quitting on me, but to my dismay, I now found that the cold water spigot was doing the exact same thing. So now, they are both malfunctioning and although my landlord came over to look at it, he wasn't willing to replace the faucet and instead just jury rigged it enough to make it work - sort of. He said that the faucet wasn't replaceable, which I know darn well it is. I suspect he just didn't want to take apart the entire shower assembly to do the job since he also had a plumbing repair to do in my kitchen that same day. So he sort of fixed it, but now it's on the fritz again, so now my landlord is finally willing to replace the faucet entirely, something he should have done in the first place. 
It really drives me crazy how, instead of fixing things the first time and doing it right, my landlord is always jury rigging things and then later, he has to spend more money to actually repair things. Why not spend the money the first time and fix whatever is broken rather than buying a bunch of cheap materials to "sort of" repair something and hope it holds instead of just going to the hardware store and getting the materials to replace something that is not working properly? I mean, I waited years, literally years, for the new bathroom while the old one continued to crumble and he kept sort of fixing things and telling me what a hassle it would be to replace them. In the end, he ended up having to replace all of the fixtures (save the bathtub, which he wanted to get rid of entirely and replace with a tiny box of a shower stall - no thank you! I demanded that the tub be kept, no matter how much room it takes up in my tiny closet of a bathroom!). So what good did it do to delay the inevitable? Sure, it may have saved him a few bucks over the space of time, and maybe if I owned this place I might think a little differently, but I have always been of the opinion that you do a job right the first time so that you don't have to go back later and do it again, thus saving you time and money. But maybe I am a bit old fashioned in my ways of thinking these days......
1 comment:
Most likely the washers are getting loose inside the faucet. Tell your landlord to put some "Loctite" on the screw threads when he works on it next time.
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