Me vs the plumber

My one finished bathroom featured a sink so small I could only wash one hand in it at a time, as water spilled over the edge.

‘For heaven’s sake!’ I exclaimed, while I stood in the newly installed en suite to the main bedroom, which had somehow got smaller since it was renovated while I was away on a trip.

‘The shower’s amazing,’ said the builder boyfriend nervously, turning the lever to let out an impressive jet of scalding hot water. The new system, with its swanky DeJong cylinder hooked up to two giant water tanks in an outhouse connected to a high-tech pump to drive water around the big old Georgian house, was working very well.

But as the BB demonstrated the high pressure, the bathroom quickly flooded because the plumber and he had fallen out over the shower screen.

The plumber had ordered the biggest shower screen in Ireland, at €600, for this tiny bathroom, naturally. The BB said no, and found a small one for €200. The plumber then walked out and said he wasn’t coming back until we agreed to the €600 one, which definitely wouldn’t fit, and this impasse seems unlikely ever to be resolved.

There is also a loo with a push-button flush of the type I had left specific instructions I would not entertain under any circumstances.

If God had meant us to flush a loo with a button, he would have given us an extra long extra finger, or something.

No civilised being was ever meant to push a button on the top of a lavatory. It’s not right. I won’t do it. A loo must have a handle.