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.
‘So to recap we have three empty bathroom shells and one strangely small en suite, which does at least work.’
‘It sort of works,’ said the BB, looking more nervous. ‘The pipe to the sink has a sweat on it. When I say a sweat, it’s more of a leak.’
‘So no bathrooms then. What exactly has the plumber been doing while I’ve been away? And how does it add up to his final payment, for the entire job done?’
‘It doesn’t,’ said the BB, and he went on to describe a farcical couple of days where the plumber came to finish all four bathrooms, then demanded he be allowed to make an aluminium frame to stack the two water tanks one on top of the other, instead of side by side, and then demanded he be allowed to painstakingly and very slowly tile the mosaics of the shower floor. The BB was midway through doing this when the plumber pushed him aside and refused to take no for an answer.
Later, when the mosaics came unglued, the BB had to take them all up and start again.
He has this strange habit, the plumber, of doing absolutely anything but plumbing. I have every confidence he will turn up next week and demand I let him give me a facial.
He insists on going to buy all the ware, even though we want to choose it. He tried to get us to agree to speckly yellow non-slip vinyl flooring of the kind you find in motorway service stations. He is a brilliant heating engineer, leaving aside his questionable ambitions in interior design, so it’s a shame he doesn’t seem to want to do it.
‘Where did he find this sink?’ I asked the BB, as I contorted my hands inside the small oblong and tried to squish them both under the tap, but they wouldn’t go.
‘It looks like those sinks they have in plane loos. Did he remove it from a Ryanair Boeing 737?’
You never know with him. He arrived one day with a vast Jacuzzi bath and dumped it on our driveway. He said he had got it from another job where someone changed their mind. It sat on our drive for months, covered in a horse rug, until I threw such a fit about it not being installed that the builder b had to drag it into the barn to hide it from me, lest I smash it to bits with a sledgehammer.
So we stood in the tiny en suite, the BB and I, barely able to move around each other to get out. I had to squeeze into the shower area to let him through the door.
‘How has he managed to shrink the space?’ The builder b said he didn’t know but once a shower screen went in he didn’t see how you could sit on the loo.
‘But you could wash one hand in the sink as you wash one leg in the shower while using the loo from a standing position,’ I pointed out. ‘We could have a mile-high club experience in here, if we were feeling romantic.’ The BB nodded philosophically.
‘Maybe we can put a slide lock on the door that says Engaged or Vacant, and a flashing sign saying Fasten Seat Belt.’
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