What marketing wanted

We designed a bath that was sleak and sexy, with a thermostatic valve that allows you to set the temperature with one knob, and select bath or shower with the second knob. The knobs are tucked behind a concertina shower screen, the bath filler sits inside the bath (on the side you don't see), and the shower head comes out of the wall, so all of the plumbing is invisible.

The builder imagined a typical British bath, with two taps poking through the ledge of the tub, and a hose running from this to the showerhead.  (It's not called a 'British telephone' for nothing.)

Unfortunately, in all the discussions we had, we never recognized the disparity.  We didn't think about it when the builder plastered over the wall; we didn't think about it when he tiled over that.  We only realized it when the builder looked at the valve and said something in Polish which I can only assume translated to, "Oh, shit."

It became quickly apparent this was beyond the builder, so I called the plumber, who is English, and he said, "Oh, shit."

Then he said something that was more helpful and quite terrifying: A day and half plus parts.

The problem wasn't that we needed to cut into the newly-tiled wall; the problem was that we needed to move the studs.  Failing that, we needed to relocate the valve to the side wall, where it was going to be quite visible (the exact effect Jess was trying to avoid), and that was a masonry wall.  To accomodate the pipes, the hole needed to be much larger than the valve, and even worse, the pipes were meant to run up to the shower, but now we had to run them down, around the bath, and then up the adjacent wall.

Oh, and did I mention that the bath still hasn't arrived, so we have to do all this work based on paper measurements and hope the bath fits?

It was not a great start to the morning, which was immediately followed by discovering the cabinet doors in the utility room won't open (they hit the toilet) and the new kitchen cabinets won't fit (they are 2cm -- about 1 inch -- too long).