Ear­lier this year one of our local plumb­ing sup­pli­ers decided to close down a few of their branches as the econ­omy con­tin­ued to sour. As the days went by the prices went south and I made sev­eral trips to all three branches to col­lect mate­ri­als and parts for the Bun­galoft  project. I had a wish list of course but few of the things on that list were actu­ally pre­sented for sale. But I did man­age turn up quite a few items at bottom-line pleas­ing prices. One of those was this thermo valve for the shower faucet.

It’s pur­pose is to blend the incom­ing hot and cold water into a thermostatically-controlled,  non-scalding, never-too-cold stream of bliss­ful show­er­dom. A nor­mally spendy com­po­nent of a spendier shower sys­tem, I got it for a quar­ter of the going rate thus fit­ting it right into a less notice­able col­umn of  the bal­loon­ing bud­get. But i digress …

The more inter­est­ing bit is the fact that this becomes part of the cus­tom shower fit­ting project. Because I found very few shower sys­tems I liked and fewer still that were afford­able (in the plunk down hard cold cash sense), I con­cluded it was time to add the shower fix­tures to the ambi­tious col­lec­tion of things-to-do-in-the-shop-for-the-house. (Hav­ing machine tools in the shop is often handy and some­times con­ducive to exces­sive flights of fancy. We’ll see which this is … )

I’ve sub­se­quently tracked down the sec­ond of the three bits of valv­ing nec­es­sary to do the behind the scenes work. Some brass fit­tings and con­nec­tors for the PEX house plumb­ing lines will join the com­po­nents and present some threaded pipe at the busi­ness side of the shower wall. At that point the cre­ative work begins.