Comment on Can I replace my shower controls?
misterundercoat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Real talk OP: From your post and comments it’s pretty clear that you don’t have much plumbing experience. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with replacing a shower valve.
If this is your main bath, this is not the job to learn on. Especially if you don’t have any shutoff valves between your main and the shower. If you run into something unexpected during the repair, and you’d be stuck with all your water shut off while you wait for a plumber, and then you’re also paying emergency rates.
As it is now, you have all the time in the world to consult plumbers and compare estimates. With your water shut off and your shower broken, your options will shrink really fast.
If getting into home improvement is something you’re interested in, and this is a spare bathroom you can afford to be out of commission for an indefinite period, and it won’t require your main valve to be shut off, then by all means give it a try. But expect there to be surprises and fuckups as part of the learning process.
theragu40@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m someone who used my main (only) shower/bath to learn this stuff on. My wife happened to be 8.5 months pregnant. Don’t be me.
I got it done, it works, it doesn’t leak, it looks how I want. But it was stressful AS FUCK, and my extremely pregnant wife was showering at the YMCA for almost a week while I was dicking around with this stuff (we re-tiled the whole tub surround, including replacing all the drywall with cement board, reinsulating, vapor barrier, etc). Like…I don’t regret doing it because we had tiles falling off and it needed to be done. And I’m glad I learned all the things I learned.
But it was not easy, I ran into tons of shit I was not prepared to handle and had to figure out on the fly, and it was very time sensitive and stressful. I might have chosen to start earlier if given another chance lol.