Shower unit and fittings

That's enough planning for now, I'm sure I'll be able to figure out the details as I go.  What I really need to do, to get started, is spend some money.  Luckily this is something I'm pretty damn good at.

However I do this, I need a shower unit that will allow me to extend the shower head further than usual, and bury the pipes in the wall. What I really wanted, is just the workings of a shower unit, without the fittings, and then I could plug fittings onto the end of whatever I cobble together.  After a very brief search, it's obvious that a "digital" shower is what I want, so I can position the controls remotely from the plumbing, giving more flexibility.  These also come in pump / controller only format, so I could choose my fittings to go with it. I pretty quickly settled on the Mira Platinum Dual:

It's a nice looking unit, that has two outputs (one for head, one for hand shower), and has some nice features such as a "warm-up program" and timers, and some other cool stuff I can't remember right now. I figured the pump bit would go in the what-was-wooden box, which I'll rebuild somehow in a better way, that won't rot or decay. Figure that out later.

At £400 for the controller and pump, it's not cheap, but not prohibitively expensive, and should be decent quality with warranty etc. I'm no shower expert, but I've heard of Mira, so I'm saying that's a good thing, and a trustworthy brand.






During my search, I did find one preferable option that's worth mentioning.  The RainBrain, by Hansgrohe. This is an awesome unit that controls everything from showers (yes, plural, up to five), to music and lights. It has a super-cool touchscreen interface, and can spray water at you from several different directions, with different programmes, and flow rates, and all sorts.  It probably makes tea, cleans the house, and sucks you off as well, it's just THAT good.

Unfortunately, at almost £5k, it's just a hair's breadth outside my price range.

So with the Mira Platinum Dual in my shopping basket, now all I need is a big ass shower head, and a hand shower to plug on the ends.  There are thousands of shower heads out there, I shan't bore you with my research, I needed it to be big, and that was about the only requirement. I figured square would probably be easier to embed in a ceiling, however I do it.  I found this one:

There were lots that looked similar in the Google shopping search results, but I didn't pay much attention when I found this, it looked about right. Stainless steel, square, 400mm wide, and it looked nice enough that however it ends up in the ceiling, it'll look fine concealed or visible. I found it on www.bathempire.com, which now seems to be soak.com, for £90.  Pretty decent price I thought, so I bagged it.

n.b. If you're reading this doing your own research, don't run off to Bath Empire just yet. Read on, fellow wet-room enthusiast.

Just the hand-shower bit of the puzzle left now then.  Now how do I want that to look?  And where will I position it?  I want to continue the clean, minimalist look, and conceal it if I can.  But where?

If you paid attention to the previous photo of my wet room, or you know my wet room, you'll know there's a ledge at the end, about 6 inches lower than the window sill, just over 6 inches deep. It's solid, all the way down, and seems to be there just for the sake of being there.  If I'm going to the trouble of burying pipes in the wall for the head shower, it's not much of a leap to bury the hand shower pipes in this lump of whatever-it-is at the end of the room.

There we go, that's the plan.  Big head shower in the floating ceiling of light, and hand shower on the end of the usual chrome tubing stuff, but with the tubing stuff extending out of, and retracting back into, the solid ledge thing.

Quick bit of research, it turns out that what I want is called a "Deck-mounted" shower.  Makes sense, mounted on the deck, seem to usually be mounted on the end of a bath.  I settle on this simple, minimalist, stainless steel version:

I got it from www.ukbathroomstore.co.uk for £34. Bargain.  I thought the stainless steel will look nice if it's mounted on a hefty lump of black marble or stone of some sort.

So that's now in the plan then, hefty black stone tops for the ledge with the hand shower coming out, and while I'm at it, the windowsill as well to match.









So that's that, all the equipment bits for a new shower room, for 524 quid.  Not cheap, no, but not extravagant, and it's all good quality stuff that should last.  So I'm chuffed at my purchases.  They've all since arrived, and I'm still chuffed.  The shower controls are slightly deeper than I expected, and the outside ring rotates to control the shower pressure.  This makes it feel a little less solid in your hand, but that might be because it's not mounted on the wall yet. I'm sure once it's up it'll be great.  It's got a nice bright blue backlit display as well, mounted in gloss black. I like it.
The hand shower and head shower are just as expected. Heavy feeling quality stainless steel, just as pictured.

Next job, choosing tiles.  My least favourite thing....choosing what looks nice...

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The Plan

I've always liked suspended ceilings; the sort that is seemingly floating in space, with light beaming out around it, not the square tile sort of dirty white cork you find in most schools and offices.

The sort that looks like this:

Don't they look nice? Sleek, modern, stylish, and a light source.

So I begin pondering how it might look in my small wet room. It was immediately obvious that the *only* sensible course of action, would be to conceal a big ass shower head in there. Could I do that? Should be possible, right? Hide some pipes, some wires, why not?

Think about it - a clean, sleek, floating platform with bright light beaming out the top, and a torrent of water pouring out below. Obviously I'd pop my waterproof speakers back up there and wire them up somehow.

Light, music, and water, all out of the ceiling.

Sold. Absolutely 100% unequivocally S - O - L - D.

It just has to be done, and there's no turning back now.

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So it begins...

The wet room in my flat needed some pretty serious attention. The once pristine white tiles had become yellowish and grotty, the drain had an aromatic hairy slime under the cover, and the wooden tiled box that concealed the plumbing had rotted and collapsed, revealing a  pretty healthy plant root system coming through my walls.  It was unusable.

The photo really doesn't show the extent of the grime. On the bottom right you can just about see the bin bags and duct tape over the collapsed wooden box, which probably created a nice humid bio-dome type environment for the invading plant life to flourish.

The ceiling was Artex covered plasterboard nailed onto wooden battens, in a once-white-now-yellow emlusion paint. A pane of frosted paisley glass rested in a framed hole with a standard ceiling rose behind it.  You can see one of the small speakers I had previously installed, which had cables running through the wall to a phono socket in the hallway outside.

I had fitted the shower myself a few years before, and just hung on some screws in the wall.  The 22mm pipes came out of the wall and into flexi-pipe compression fittings, into the shower.

Lastly, the chrome towel rail, standard 15mm copper pipes go round the room and through to the bedroom to the left, with two T-junctions going through the the bathroom next door, to the right

So, it's time to refurbish.....what to do what to do....

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