We have a new year surprise the other day. First my wife noticed the water flow into the bathroom drain was quite slow during shower time. After some continuous nagging, oops sorry, I mean "friendly reminder", we decided to get our hands "dirty" and visit the "underground world"...
Before that, all my dear readers, can you please show your hands if any of you ever open your bathroom drain cover and look what's inside the plug hole? It's certainly not a nice scene, and normally we would just expect to see lots of hair down there causing the blockage.
Well, then take a look at the photo below and see what we found in our Ensuite bath room:
Yes, concretes! Big handful of them! In our newly built house and we just moved in for around 8 months!
We quickly checked all 3 bathrooms and the laundry. All the ground floor ones are clear, a few smaller concrete debris were also found in the main bathroom shower area upstairs.
The worst one is the floor drain in the middle of the main bathroom upstairs. The whole thing was blocked by a huge concrete as shown in photo below, only a few small holes left around the corner could allow the water to flow through. We suspect someone poured the cement down the drain during the construction...
We contacted our builder and they quickly sent someone to remove it last week.
The problem sort of resolved, but that doesn't solve the mystery, why?
Conspiracy thinking starts emerging....Why is there concrete in there? Was it done accidentally or purposely? Who would do that kind of damage? .....
After some discussion within the family we think the only person who could be using cement/concrete, and working in the wet areas after lock down (and before handover) would be the C & L tiler subcontracted by our builder.
We did have our own tilers after handover for tiling the kitchen floor and front porch areas. But we watched/followed them quite closely everyday, they won't have a chance to go upstairs to do anything.
We also recalled that the tiler from C & L did the ground floor tiling job quite well. But when it comes to the upstairs ones, not sure whether he used it as an opportunity to train his apprentices, or was he busy with other jobs and thus not paying much attention to ours, we complaint a few times about the quality and even the builder's own inspector asked him to re-do a few tiles in some areas.
I don't think that's a problem with my builder as the tiler is the subcontractor, and it's almost impossible for inspectors to check each and every drain/plug holes for wet areas...
So, as a lesson for all new house owners who ever complaint about the tiling work (who didn't?), make sure you check "inside" the plug holes for all your wet area! It might be a "common trick" for tilers to show their "revenge"?? Don't know...
Any way, that's it for the not-so-happy stuffs. I like to share with you some more interesting ones, hopefully would cheer everyone up a bit for the new year...
I found these beautiful drain covers from Linkasink. It's quite amazing to see the plain, boring, drain covers can be in so many different kinds of shape and design!
Finally, to stop those hair blocking your bathroom drain, there's this product from Kaboodle.
Note sure if all these products are available in Australia...
Happy New Year!
1 comment:
Another inexpensive way to keep hair out of the drain is to cut a piece of window screen to fit under the drain covers. When your drain starts to slow, remove the drain cover, clean the window screen and replace. Easy, cheap and effective.
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