Taps and beards

 If I were alone in the world (by which I mean, somehow - heaven forbid! - deprived of the company of the lovely Jackie), I would certainly grow a beard.  For me, the relaxed living style which accompanies getting up in the morning and not even thinking about shaving is worth much more than "keeping up appearances" - by which I mean, worrying about what other people think of one's appearance.  But, the lovely Jackie has a dog in this particular race too, because her comfort is affected when she snuggles up against my cheek, and she declares a full beard to be too prickly.

So I am caught in a slight dilemma - I'd prefer not to think about shaving (except possibly on special occasions) and Jackie would prefer my cheeks to be beautifully smooth.

Actually I think if I did grow a proper beard, it would eventually be perfectly snuggly, in a fur coat sort of way.  Whereas, my current "occasional" shaving habit results, on average, in a cheek texture similar to part-worn 40-grit sandpaper.  Or at least a small, stiff brush.  Possibly the worst possible compromise, on the snuggling front. Oh dear.

Meanwhile, regular readers will remember my disdain for the Roca sanitary ware that came with our house from a previous post.  But there's another thing that has always been a slight niggle about the process of lavation chez Sears: the taps provided (Ideal Standard - which are neither ideal nor standard of course, that's just the name of the shop, love) are essentially just sink fillers.  They stick out over the sink and deliver their watery load vertically downwards, from a point about half an inch back from the front end.

just a sink filler

This works fine for the purpose of filling the sink, but that's about all.  If you should want to get your face under the flowing water to rinse off your shaving gloop, it's not really possible.  You can put your hands underneath and collect some water, but you have to manoeuvre your cupped hands round the tap before you can use it.  The tap sticks out into the sink enough to get in the way when you are washing, but still delivers water right at the back of the bowl, which makes it difficult to swill running water around when you're cleaning it.    None of this is actually, really a serious problem, I must admit.  Many people would be, quite rightly, just very grateful for the copious hot water and general functional adequacy of the whole kaboodle.  But I know better.

Our friends Mike and Belinda redid their bathroom a while ago with a rather unusual but exceptionally pleasing Moroccan vibe to the whole thing.  And in the hand basin they fitted a waterfall tap.

This marvellous device solves all the problems mentioned above by projecting water out in front of itself into the middle of the basin from an open-topped spout.  It doesn't sound like much of a change, but really makes a difference!  The first time I used their one, I was genuinely delighted by the experience. 

So, with nothing much going on these days, I decided to splash out, (ha!) follow their lead, and fit one in our family bathroom. I even went to the trouble of finding out the exact model they had, to avoid the disappointment of accidentally choosing something inferior.

Then the complications began.  Even though Mike and Belinda's tap has a a remote waste system just like ours (you can see the little chrome knob behind the tap in the picture above), I was completely unable to source that tap (or, indeed ANY waterfall tap) with such a feature on the internet.  It seems that today's trendy solution is the so-called "click-clack" waste, which has a mechanism like a retractable ballpoint pen in the pipe, so you just push the chrome lid to make it go up and down.  Ah, but there's a problem.  The mechanism, together with its supports, partly fill the pipe, and the remaining little spaces get clogged with hairs and the usual drain gunge.  On most of these click-clacks, you can unscrew the top, but then you have to poke around in the drain to get the gunk out - not very nice.  I actually like the system we have at the moment better; you can lift the plug right out and clean it up, and the drain itself is almost clear of obstructions.

Fortunately, somebody at tap-mongers Vellamo has though of a solution, and developed a click-clack waste which can be bodily removed from the pipe.  They also make a fairly similar looking waterfall tap, which comes with a spectacular ten year guarantee.  These two features convinced me to buy their offering - even though their tap comes bundled with a "free" click-clack waste system which isn't the one you want! You have to buy that separately, and then you end up with a redundant waste thingy, even though you never even wanted to change the waste in the first place.  Grrr!

And so to plumbing.  All modern taps come complete with flexible "tails", so it should be pretty trivial to swap them over, right?  Not quite - the old tap has tails with a female 10mm connector at the tap end, and a 15mm compression fitting at the other end.  The new ones have a male 10mm at the tap end, and a female end-face thing with a flat washer at the other end.  Sigh.  

tap with tails

Incidentally, there seems to be no proper way to tighten the tails into the tap - there's no room in there for any kind of tool, as far as I can see.  Hmmm... Fortunately they don't need to be very tight for the little O-ring seal to work.

no room in the tap

Also fortunately, Screwfix are still open to supply a solution to the tails compatibility issue, in the shape of pair of little isolating valves which have a compression fitting to connect to the house, and will accept the flat washer fitting thingy at the other end, even though they weren't really designed for it.  So no real problems there.

But to change the waste, you need to remove the pedestal from underneath the basin.  This necessitates  jacking the basin up, so you need to loosen the connectors on the waste pipe first.  The connectors are meant to be hand-tightened, but dear old Roca, in their very limited wisdom, decided to make the inside of the pedestal so narrow that you simply can't get your fingers in there.  So I had to make this special tool out of a bit of scrap aluminium:

another special tool (yawn)

...which did the job very nicely, thank you.

And so, eventually, it all got done, including white sealant round the edges and everything, and I'm very happy with the result.

I know it doesn't look much, but it is so much more joyous to use than the old one that I find myself washing my face much more often than I used to.  

I'm even thinking I might be able to increase my frequency of shaving to something more than once a month...