From The Desk of Nerd³ - May 2024 Edition

Dearest Patreons,

I know about plumbing as much as you’d expect, which is somewhere nestled close to ‘bugger’ and ‘all’, with ‘zilch’ sitting a few seats back. I know that there are pipes, that water goes through them, and that if you line them all up the right way then you’ve either got plumbing or you’ve managed to hack a security system in Bioshock. Beyond that, no idea. If there’s ever a problem, mostly water in places water shouldn’t be, then I get a man in. The man has spanners, whatever spanners are.

Unfortunately, I’m also male, and every now and then a blob of seriously misplaced self-assurance bubbles to the surface, causing me to do something stupid. Normally I’d just get into boastful internet fights about how big of an animal I could wrestle (a lion, maybe three with prep time), how many points I could score against Serena Williams in a tennis match (I’d let her win), or that it doesn’t matter if you put me in the woods with a bear or a man, I could easily take them both. As the blob spilled over this time however, I did something potentially very, very stupid.

I bought a shower and decided to install it myself.

Okay, that makes it seem like a far rasher decision than it was. In actual fact, the shower had been sitting in the bathroom, boxed, for the better part of several years, slowly falling away into life’s periphery. It’s one of those Really Good Ideas™ that you quickly realise that you’re not ready for as the dust slowly reclaims it, it’s eventual banishment to the loft beckoning.

For some reason, maybe the wind was blowing in just the right way, or maybe the new pills I’m on have eliminated my ability to make good choices, this week became shower install week. I unpacked the web-covered box to discover about forty more parts than I was expecting. I have a bar shower, which is one of those horizontal metal cylinders that have on/off on one side and temperatures on the right, with a long bar raising from the top of it, curving over the user, and a shower head no smaller than one acre in size to distribute some boiling hot/ice cold water. I expected therefore to find three parts. Vertical bar. Horizontal bar. Shower head.

No. Inside this rotting box was an endless array of pipe parts, machined metal, and an instruction manual in three languages that I don’t think exist anymore. None of the parts matched up with the pictures, and most looked like an AI had generated them from the phrase “complicated plumbing parts”. One part was like the old s-bend piece from Rollercoaster Tycoon, with each side seemingly ready to screw into something of a different size. I did the sensible thing here and threw that away instantly, just in case it was cursed.

Then there were the screws. Imagine the world’s smallest screw, then imagine it smaller and more irritating. No more than a nanometre long, with no discernible right way around, and allen key holes instead of useful crosses or lines, these screws looked like they wouldn’t be able to support emotional weight, let alone running water. Oh, and the allen key size required to fit these? Thinner than a pre-pubescent chest hair.

Anyway, with all my bits and bobs properly and beautifully knolled, it was time to take down the old shower. First, I took a trip to the secret location where you turn the water off which, like in every house ever made, is in the most inconvenient location possible, smothered by mostly empty bottles of kitchen cleaner. With that done, I then went to make myself a drink for the job. No water. Bollocks.

Water on. Drink made. Water off. Dog bowl needs refilling. Water on. Dog bowl filled. Water off. Realise that the dishwasher is on, etc etc etc…

After three days of this, I eventually started the disassembly process, which basically involved a game I like to call, “see what you can twist off with your hands”. The shower head was the first winner here, although it did immediately spill water over me to such a degree that I had flashbacks to my spring breaks in Cancún. Then the adjustable wrench came out and I went to town, removing the bottom bar from the wall and… that was it. Everything else held together firmly onto the wall, with no obvious screw holes. After a careful inspection, I discovered microscopic holes about the place. Ones that would take an allen key the size of a pre-pubescent chest hair. After some twisting, much swearing, and dropping the allen key on around four thousand separate occasions, the shower was away, revealing a support hole that was in the wrong place, and the wrong shape mounts for the decorative pipe covers behind the horizontal bar. In a moment of genius, I decided to just clean up the old circular covers instead of using the new square ones. I sprayed them down with some relentlessly strong cleaner that started to eat away at my flesh, scrubbed all the limescale off, and went to rinse them off using water which wasn’t working, and couldn’t be turned back on until the shower was more than just two pipes sticking out of the wrong shaped mounts on the wall.

After a few hours of screaming in my favourite forest, I washed the covers off with the last of my drinking water and began to attach the new temperature bar to the wall. First, a liberal application of plumber’s tape, which is like if Sellotape fucked a balloon, and then I attached the bar to the wall, only to have to remove it seconds later because I’d forgotten the washers that stop water shooting out the back like it had dysentery.

Next up was the mount that held the vertical bar up. I needed to drill a hole through the tiles waaaay above the bar, softly enough so as not to crack the dammed things, but hard enough so that my not-for-tiles drill bit could actually make progress. Honestly, this part of the process made the drills in Payday 2 look quick and competent. Still, I didn’t crack any tiles, just three ribs as I fell off the ladder.

With the mount mounted, I attached the vertical bar, tightened the whole thing up, and realised that I’d stripped the majority of the tiny screws in doing so. No big deal, I thought, it’s not like I’ll be taking it off anytime soon. I stood back to admire my handiwork, only to trip over the last few pieces of the build. The 2nd showerhead, the metal hose I’d forgotten to attach the horizontal bar earlier, and the mount to attach it to the vertical bar. A mount which, due to the perfectly enclosed rectangle it was built around, needed to go upon the now irremovable vertical bar about three steps ago.

I’ll draw a curtain over the rest of this event here. The shower is up now and it is working. It doesn’t leak, it looks good, and I didn’t have to get a man in to do it. All it cost me was £70, three stress-induced heart attacks, and whatever it costs to get the man out when it inevitably explodes in the future.

Happy May,

Daniel

xx