Choosing and fitting a new shower tub carrier for your
bathroom
What a shower - they couldn't work out how to fit a
Kaldewei shower tray
Shower tray installation was promised to be a simple matter by
our plumber - a sage old man who wanders around the house muttering 'Bello',
'Grande' and 'Buono' seemingly at random and to himself. The reality of
our experience fitting a new shower tray was a bit different and went as
follows.
I am disabled and require a bigger space and stronger platform than most
therefore we were already focussing on a quality product and not the
usual bog-standard (if you'll excuse the pun) bathroom fitting. In
consultation with our local builder's merchants we chose a Kaldewei
enamel steel shower tray or shower tub carrier as it is sometimes
called. The size I chose was large but not the biggest; 1.2m x 1.2m and
it was made of thick white enamel steel. As a result we were quoted over
€400 and a delivery period of 4 weeks.
About 2 months later, the shower tray finally arrived and we took
delivery of it. We had left a suitable space in the floor of our
bathroom but had not been able to plumb it in as we weren't certain of
the location of the drainage holes in the floor of the shower tray.
We opened the huge cardboard box and removed the steel tray. We were
surprised to see that it had wires attached to it but later reading of
the rather confusing instructions suggested that we need to ask our
electrician to earth this surface. So, now we had 2 builders men waiting
to finish the bathroom, a plumber waiting to fix the shower tray and an
electrician earthing it.
On top of that, the shower tray came mounted on a huge chunk of
polystyrene which we assumed was packing (and rather wasteful at that).
It turned out that this was to be embedded in the floor of the bathroom
around the pipe work and the shower tray mounted on top of that. The
instructions from Kaldewei leave a lot to be desire - multilingual they
may be but they are completely confusing in any of the ones we
understand. I've got them in front of me and, even though we now know
how it all works, the instructions don't seem a whole deal clearer!
After many man-hours of swearing, arguing and, finally, sweating, we got
the shower tray fixed into place and tiles laid around it to protect it
and to keep water from going underneath it. If it works as well as it
looks, it will have been worth it.
We're now waiting for the plumber to put the silicone sealant around it
and then I can use our Kaldewei shower tray.
|