Floating Pipes

The shower head in the downstairs bathroom works fine. It’s functional, but when you try to adjust the head, a problem becomes obvious. The plumbing is floating. The copper pipe that travels behind the wall of the shower, from the handles to the head—maybe 3 feet vertically—is not braced to anything. So, at the point where the pipe makes a 90 degree turn and comes out of the wall, it’s not stationary. I can grab the shower head and push it back until it touches the wall. Cosmetically, you can’t tell. The wall cap hugs the pipe just behind the head and sits flush to the wall.Someone made that decision. Before the drywall was put in, before everything was covered up and finished, someone decided the copper shower piping didn’t need to be braced. Wobble was okay, so long as it looked cosmetically acceptable.Someone decided the appearance of perfection was sufficient. That person doesn’t have to live with a floating shower head.Exterior appearance is easy to improve. The interior, the bones, on the other hand, are harder to change. It’s easy to throw new paint on an old building; it's quite difficult to re-plumb it.Get the bones right. It’s the first step to making something last.Take the extra time in what you can’t see, even if it doesn’t change what you can see. It builds trust. It develops ownership.And it saves work in the end.Don’t obsess about the paint. Not yet, anyways.