That Annoying Pipework

The plumbers were back again today to redo the work on the pipes for the family bathroom. Their attitude were extremely unpleasant. Not only were they condescending towards me, they kept insisting that the placement of the pipes was not going to affect the final installation, and that I was being unnecessarily fussy. So I insisted that they did a mock installation of the tapware. Sure enough, the floor-mounted tap was not level, and the two 'feet' could not attach to the tap properly. So in the end, they had to admit that they screwed up royally. They offered to cut the copper piping and re-solder the ends but looking at their previous work, I had no confidence whatsoever in their ability to even get this correct. In the end, I had to compromise and settle for allowing the use of some teflon tape around one of the pipes to level it to the other one during the final installation process. It is annoying me because it is not going to be perfect, made even worse by the fact that I had been emphasizing the correct placement of pipes right from the start to a builder who clearly has no interest in making sure the work is done right.

After jack-hammering part of our concrete floor in the family bathroom and completely destroying the Termimesh barrier around the pipework, our builder was going to get the plumbers to fill up the hole with concrete. Hubby insisted that they hold off on filling the hole. After some very firm words with the builder, he finally agreed to contact Termimesh and to get them to send their inspector out to check what needed to be done to ensure the termite protection was not compromised. If we had not been firm, I'm quite sure they would have poured concrete over the torn Termimesh barrier. The quality of tradie work at our site is turning into quite the joke.

As part of the electrical work in the kitchen, the electrician had to relocate and run some wires that will sit behind the kitchen cabinets. We have designed the kitchen cabnets to have powerpoints and light switches directly underneath the overhead cupboards, hidden out of sight. Our kitchen guys went even a step further and designed a void to feed the cables into so they can just come out of a hole and the power points can go over them.

Just to add more annoyance to our day, the electrician decides to turns a wall in our kitchen into a criss-cross web of wires and telephone lines. We had some electrical cables that had to be repositioned for our new kitchen. Somehow, the electrician thought that it was totally acceptable to leave us with this work.

The only saving grace for the entire day was the arrival of the handles for our laundry. We ordered them in blind faith from a company in the US and were a little apprehensive about their quality. They arrived today and we were so pleased. They are very solid and heavy and the aged brass colour that we picked will be perfect for the laundry.

#DKDaltonPlumbing #plumbing #familybathroom #floormountedtap #electricalwork #cabinethandles