Wednesday 25 February 2015

Refitting the Bathroom 4. Shower

Another bathroom post, I hope you don't mind; our lives currently revolve around little else and so the blog will naturally do likewise for a while still.

Since I last posted the focus has been on tiling in the hope we'd have the main walls done before the sparky arrived to wire in our new shower on Tuesday morning. This was a close call that saw us grouting like mad on Monday evening, but we did get there.

Tiled and grouted walls

This shower is one of the rather exciting bits about our new setup, a gadget for the bathroom! In the old bathroom the shower was one of those "connected to the bath taps" jobs, except that the handle to switch from bath to shower had long since snapped off and a spanner lived on the bathroom windowsill for this purpose. Having seen so many of the bathtap/shower combos that have failed over time we decided to try something different.

Shower fittings on the wall all ready to go.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard we tried to rearrange things, the bath and consequently the shower needed to go in the same location as before - with the shower head on a rather thin and flimsy stud wall. Worried about the weight of sitting a classic electric shower there we've opted for a digital shower instead. Any excuse!

The main body of our shower, tucked snuggly out of the way.

With a digital shower the bulk of the unit sits tidily away under the bath with just a small outlet for the shower head required in our stud - hopefully much less strain on the wall. The shower is controlled by a remote unit which, in the case of the one we've chosen, is wireless (you can also get digital showers where the remote is connected by a long length of wire). This means it can sit anywhere in the bathroom with no worries about water flow and pipework.

The wireless shower controller

Getting the shower wired into our mains has been the only job we've employed someone to do (well that and soldering up our pipework mishap), and yesterday Andy came and sorted it out for us. We used Andy to help us sort out the electrics when we first bought the house and he did all that was needed yesterday with minimal fuss which was great. All we need to do now is silicon around the edge of the bath and we can have a shower!