5d ago

The horror, momentarily, abates

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I really want to take super long showers, but I pay the water bill so.....
Fact is, the shower we have is.... Strange to say the least.
It's a wand. Only a wand. Most wand showers also hang up in a way that allows you to just, use it like a normal shower.... Not this one. I actually hate it, but don't have the budget to replace it right now, since it will likely need a partial renovation for the bathroom and that's our only shower, so everyone is going to get a bit stinky while it's reno'd.
What I want to do is to add a new bathroom with a shower/bath, then reno the current one, so we can shower during the reno.
Edit: before anyone else comments about how easy it is to change your shower head, I don't think you understand exactly how strange our shower is. There's nowhere to put a "normal" shower head. There's no pipe coming out of the wall at head-height that we can connect a shower head to. The wand literally goes into the wall of the tub when it's not in use (similar to how the sprayer things work on some kitchen sinks.... If you're familiar with that, but the controls are not just a button on the handle to turn it on, they're on the edge of the tub.
Weird enough for you?
I can see a cutout in the wall panel of the shower where the diverter should go, and it's not cut open. We will need to tear out about half of the wall panels to put in the diverter and a standard shower head connector thing.... I'm not a plumber, but the one we hired when the original hardware in the shower started leaking took about three days or more to find hardware to install that would work with the odd layout of it.
I know it doesn't really come across by text, so if you want some semblance of what I'm dealing with, the wand is a bit like this one... Or at least closer to this than what you have in your showers: https://www.livinghouse.co.uk/acatalog/Bath-Rim-Pull-Out-Shower-Head.html
Yeah. I hate it.
- Do you know how long a renovation would take? Maybe you could get away with washing with a wet rag/towel to save building a whole new bathroom. Unless you also just want two bathrooms because that's neat to have.
  
  Oh. We want another bathroom for completely unrelated reasons. Since we considered this place, we knew that we wanted to renovate to put in a bathroom and some other things. It's always been a part of the plan.
  To be brief: the house purchase was a joint venture by myself and my partner with my brother and his partner. We have two family units under the same roof. I won't get into all of the reasons we decided to go this way, but needless to say, there's one shower for essentially two families.
  Where the current bathrooms and shower are (we have two bathrooms right now, only one has a shower), they're in my brother's "side" of the house. My "side" of the house isn't even plumbed with water at all.
  So the plan is, and always has been, to do renovations at some point to bring water over to that side of the house, and have a bathroom installed for my partner and I. We also want our own kitchen and a couple other small things. There's space to do it, the garage is far larger than we need, so we're going to convert part of it over to be the new bathroom space, and there's a good area in our current "living room" that we want to turn into a type of galley kitchen.... More or Less.
  So by getting those renovations done first, we would have a second shower and the situation in the house would just kind of reverse. Instead of us going into their part of the house to get a shower, they would come to our side until their shower is finished.
  
  That makes a lot of sense, wish you good luck on the whole process
  
  Thanks. I'll need it.
- You probably don't need a full renovation to replace a showerhead. I'm not good at much, but am vaguely competent with basic plumbing. Post a photo of the shower. Most likely you just need a wrench, a new shower-head, and some nylon tape. If you want to get fancy, they also make extenders so you can add extra showerheads without a renovation.
  
  It's definitely not going to be that easy.
  Let me describe what was there when we moved in.... So, the bathroom has a fairly typical tub, for the purposes of this explanation, we won't go into things that aren't directly relevant.... So for now, it's fairly typical. However, there's no hot/cold controls on the wall, there's a faucet on the corner of the tub basin, with a lever that acts as the diverter, two knobs for hot and cold and there's, what looks like a grab bar, but it actually is a specialty pipe for the existing wand, that actually has a mount for the wand so the shower can be used normally.
  Well, without going into too much detail, I'm fairly certain that at least one person cranked on the diverter too hard (no idea why) and basically turned the insides into sand. So now there is a leak that's dripping into the lower levels creating water damage. We shut off the water. Called a plumber.
  Thousands of dollars later, our replacement faucet/diverter is odd to say the least: there is no diverter. There's actually two water controls, one for the wand, one for the tub faucet. You control both independently. The wand, no longer has a place to mount, when not in use the flex hose for it retracts into the side of the tub, leaving the head of the wand sticking out of the surface.
  For the shower itself, we have zero of the usual trimmings. There's no cutout in the wall for a diverter, there's no threaded pipe coming out of the wall above your head for a shower head. There's almost none of what you would expect.
  What I expect, on order to unfuck this situation, is that we'll have to tear out the part of the wall where the diverter and temp controls should be, install a standard diverter box, run a line from there, up the wall to put in a standard fitting for a shower head, then do all of the plumbing to make it all go, which will require copper pipe soldering, something I'm not qualified to do.
  Trust me when I say: if it were as easy as you originally thought it was, then this would not be an issue for me, and it would have been completed long ago.
  I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful here. Thanks for that, but unfortunately I think this is over both of our heads as amateurs. As far as I'm concerned, half the shower needs to be pulled apart to fix this monstrosity.
  
  Look, I offered to help, but I need a photo of what we're working with. Period. You don't want help, that's fine too. Maybe it's over our heads, maybe not. But I need a photo to determine that. That being said, if there's threading on the pipes, I'm pretty sure we could make something work.
  
  The threading is all over the place. We tried to find fittings for it. Heck.
  Also, I don't really want to show the Internet how dirty my bathroom currently is. Heh.
- I just bought one of those suction cup shower head holders for my current place when I found it doesn't have a holder. Works fine, although it's a bit temperamental about the surface.
  Those are very cheap so try getting one?
  
  That's a really good idea. I wish I could.
  I'll look into it, but the wand is kind of square. The illustration I posted was far more round than what I have.
- You should be able to just buy a new shower head for pretty cheap. It doesn't require renovation. Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding your shower.
  
  Yeah, I barely understand it. I've replaced shower heads before, but we don't even have a pipe coming out of the wall for a shower head to attach to... I explained in more detail in another reply. In case you're interested in hearing more. Either way, have a good day.

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