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| The downstairs bathroom and "en-suite" open-plan loo |
Our two bathrooms currently leave a little to be desired.
The upstairs one (the one we use at the moment) has not yet got any heating and the shower has a mind of its own, oscillating without warning, and completely at random, between freezing cold and near boiling point. It also does not appear to have a "U" bend so unsavoury smells from our (condemned) septic tank percolate into the small space of air trapped by the shower curtain - God I hate shower curtains; roll on the day when we get a DOOR.
The downstairs bathroom now has heating, but no door on one side. The loo is in what will become our bedroom, and when the upstairs loo is flushed it sounds like Niagara Falls. The light switch is suspended from a wire twelve inches off the ground, and any heat produced by the radiator rises up the old stair well into the un-insulated loft space where it dissipates into the upper atmosphere. The cast iron bath takes the heat out of the hot water as fast as it comes out of the tap, and the plug doesn't fit so you have to hold it down in order to retain any water at all.
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| Loo roll holder for the super rich |
We have thus been looking at bathroom stuff in keen anticipation of the plumber's arrival. Generally the costs are more or less the same as the UK, but there is perhaps a wider gap between the cheap and the expensive, and little apparent reason why some items suddenly sore into the super-rich category. Maybe we need to get out more, but we were fairly amazed to find a LOO ROLL HOLDER priced at 189 euros (about £165). Do people really spend that sort of money on a loo roll holder? Or perhaps it's the sort of opposite of a "loss-leader" - maybe it's a "profit-trailer".
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| The upstairs open-plan shower room with potentially valuable loo roll holder |
When we got back we noticed that we had, in our upstairs (open plan) shower room a very similar loo roll holder which will now be going on
le bon coin (the French equivalent of ebay) at the bargain price of 120 euros (plus postage).
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| Bog brush and holder for Royalty and the mega rich |
We were equally, if not more, amazed (we get fairly amazed quite often in shops these days) to find a bog brush and holder priced at 201 euros. If you paid over 200 euros for something, would you really want to stick it down a (by definition) dirty lavatory? I was beginning to wonder if all of this was something to do with a contemporary interpretation of Marcel Duchamp and his urinal artwork.
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| The epitome of fine taste for the ultimate French bathroom suite |
Happily we soon found exactly what we had been looking for. A reproduction 18th century serpentine chest of drawers, finished in imitation gold leaf, and topped with a black plastic fake marble (or was it fake Corian) wash hand basin with a rather elegant modern "waterfall" chrome tap. The whole ensemble was tastefully set off by a reproduction carved wood overmantle mirror in fake gold leaf. I am now in the process of redesigning our bathrooms so that we will be able to fit one in each of them.
