In amongst the nightmares with our aborted plan to move house, one other hiccup that came our way was the shower tray in the en-suite bathroom in our present house. Personally I blame one of the surveyors who did a report on the house for this, as when he came round, he asked whether we’d had any problems with the shower, which we hadn’t until now… (Having said that, since then we’ve come across a number of people who bought new builds and had problems with their showers, so I guess we’d just been lucky!)
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, our shower tray, which has always been slightly flexible in one corner became slightly cracked in one corner – since at this point we were expecting to exchange contracts within a couple of weeks, this was a bit of a nightmare. A work colleague of Beth’s recommended looking on the Check-a-Trade for somebody who could help. Through that site we found a guy called Chris Hickman who specialises in bathrooms and plumbing. Beth spoke to his wife, and arranged for him to come around and give us a quote. He took a look, and said that the problem was that the tray had been improperly fitted in the first place, and the support in one corner had been incorrectly adjusted. Unfortunately, the cracks were such that the only possible course of action was to take the whole tray out and put in a new one, and that unfortunately would mean replacing a row of tiles too. He went away, and came back with a really reasonable quote, certainly less than we were expecting, and said that he would be able to fit us in within a week.
Today he came along a did the work – turned up on the dot of 9am, and by 10am had the old tray out, and was starting on fitting the new tray. There was a bit of fiddling around as the drain on the new tray is in a different position, and then after that the tiling, and ensuring all of that is watertight is time consuming. However by 3:30pm he was all finished, more than that, he left the bathroom in a cleaner condition than when he started.
Now all we have to do is wait for everything to set, and I can have a shower again!