TokenBird's Musings

Cheap stuff is great but it can have a cost all of its own. I found some cheap end of line showers. Bargain at £50 each instead of the usual £100 or so similar showers were costing. I thought they were a decent make and would therefore last. Both were fitted in two separate properties.

Roll on to just over a year later. One shower is working fine. The other the button has fallen clean off. Strangely the shower manufacturer doesn’t have spares and the model number on said shower is missing off the unit so no-one knows what it is. You can’t buy the button separately. You can only buy the entire front. This cheap shower at £50 has now cost electrician’s call out plus cost of replacement shower as the old one is uneconomic to repair.  Which brings it to a grand total of a whole lot more than £100 of a comparable shower.

Along the way I have also learned: Indesit make utter rubbish. New World are nearly as cheap but seemingly much better screwed together. Cheap paint is cheap and works but you need to use much more and have more coats so it costs the same in the end. Decorators caulk is the most useful substance in the world. Fills small cracks much better than polyfilla cracked and patchy walls gloop. Removing wallpaper is horrible. Everytime you buy somewhere there is always something else that needs mending when a tenant moves in. They always find the broken knob, weak hinge or other niggly problem you hoped they wouldn’t notice. Much better to get it  right from the beginning and attend to the niggles.