Shame about the shower
My ensuite shower room refurb by MPS Plumbing Solutions was a curate’s egg. What I thought would be the hardest part of the job - cladding the walls with Multipanel MDF panels requiring lots of cutouts to accommodate sloping ceilings and awkward beams - was almost perfectly executed, as was the fitting of my new WC, large towel radiator and wall-mounted storage units. But the remodelled shower recess turned into a disaster zone.
I had carefully measured the width of the room so knew that a thin wall build-out on one side would be necessary to give the right-sized opening for a 1500mm MX shower tray and Durovin double shower doors. My brief was specific. But my MPS fitter, Scott, ignored all that or didn’t bother to ask and proceeded - without consultation - to build out the wall too far so that it conveniently blanked off one of the awkward beams. That left a 1450mm opening for a 1500mm shower tray (he did know it was 1500mm because he asked me early on); so he proceeded without consultation to chase out the brickwork on the opposite wall so that he could embed the left rim of the shower tray in the wall to make it fit. This left an expensive new shower looking uneven. When I first saw it I was horrified. I was inclined to ask for it to be ripped out and rebuilt but that would have meant redoing the wall panels too and it would have had to be at MPS’ expense.
I also warned him that the shower doors wouldn’t fit properly since their tolerance was 1470-1510mm. But he somehow shoehorned them into the 1450mm opening - at the price of slight unevenness in the way they hung.
After initially failing to make the flexible door seals watertight (MPS paid for a replacement set) the shower did function without flooding the room and I negotiated an acceptable discount with MPS for their work, albeit I have to live with a bodged shower enclosure.
The fitter had promised to squeeze in a small extra job for me but he never showed and didn’t return my calls. When he did eventually call me he was very rude and threatening. Since we had not fallen out in the three weeks he spent on my job, I can only assume that he was blaming me for being docked some pay for his shower blunder.
Mark, his boss at MPS, remained reasonable and courteous throughout but he must - and did - accept the blame for not monitoring the fitter’s work closely enough to avert the problems. MPS were fine in other respects and I would use them again - as long as they assigned me a different fitter and kept a close eye on work in progress.