Fun Fact: The Brits don’t use the word faucet, it’s all about taps here. When we didn’t have a kitchen tap for ages, I kept complaining about the lack of faucet and no one had any idea what I was talking about. This could have been why no one was doing anything about it, but I think general incompetence was probably the actual cause.

When thinking about subjects to blog about, you wouldn’t immediately think that taps would have a lot to offer. But, in fact, I have a lot to say about taps since moving to England. It’s a whole different ballgame over here.

When you move to, or even just visit, a different country you expect there to be differences but some things are really surprising. England is a wealthy country with all the modern amenities, yet tap culture hasn’t seemed to progress much past the first basics from the 19^th century. Granted, this could be because some of these buildings are actually from the 1800s, original taps included. But my house is brand new, so what’s the excuse?

I know what you’re thinking, How complicated can a tap really be? And I agree. You need hot water and cold water, and that’s about it. The most common type of tap here, especially in bathrooms, is something I like to call the two-tap-type. This consists of any size basin with a small tap on either side, each with their own handle, one for hot water and one for cold water. The major problem here is that the two taps are as far away from each other as is physically possible, which means the water they produce can never mix. So, what usually happens is, while washing your hands, you get one really hot hand and one really cold hand. Either that or you find yourself doing the hand-jive between the streams.

Something that is also worth noting is, at home when you turn on the tap– and this probably has something to do with the fact that there is only one spout –the water takes a couple of seconds to get warm, even when you only turn on the hot handle. Here, the hot water is just waiting in there, ready at a moments notice, because it knows it never has to fight with the cold water, so it’s hot immediately, and scalding shortly after, rendering it pretty damn useless.

So, clearly, this is my first tap story. Related to this one, my next story has to do with my very bathroom taps and ties in with home building nightmares. Let me recommend now that you try to avoid at all costs living in a house while it is being renovated/built, especially if you have no control over the contractors. The stories of ManHouse are extraordinary, mostly because I’m 99% sure out landlord has no business wielding tools. As I have mentioned before, we lived in our house for about two weeks before a kitchen tap was installed. This made cooking pretty difficult. At first we thought, Hey, this is built-in excuse to eat frozen pizza everyday (or rather a not-built excuse). But we quickly realised that we could cook up all the pizza we wanted but sooner or later we were going to run out of clean plates. Then the boys had the genius idea to wash all the dishes in my bathroom, which did have taps. At least for a while.

I counted myself pretty lucky when we first got here because my bathroom was the only one that was totally finished. I mean, there was no mirror on the wall, and there was a medicine cabinet sitting on the floor for about a month, but all the functioning bits were functioning. I could take a shower, brush my teeth, and flush the toilet, and that’s all that really mattered for the moment. But soon my paradise started to fall apart, just like everything else in the house.

A few days after moving in, I noticed that my taps were a little loose. When I turned the handle the spout moved a bit, only about a millimetre or so, but I figured that meant it wasn’t sealed well and I was worried it might start leaking or something; so I told my landlord. A couple days later, the one millimetre turned into a centimetre or two; so I told my landlord. Everyday the spout would shift more and more, and I would have to hold the spout with one hand while I turned the handle with the other; so I told my landlord. Until eventually my makeshift, two-handed solution just wouldn’t cut it anymore. The spout was finally just foregoing the sink altogether and pouring directly onto the floor; so I told my landlord. I think I finally said, Look, if you’ve got more pressing matters I’d be happy to wash my hands and brush my teeth at the kitchen sink but we don’t have a tap their either, so… The next day my taps were fixed.

My last tap story is about the kitchen, which I’ve already touched on. We had no running water in our kitchen for 2 weeks, and when we finally did get a tap installed it “leaked” everywhere. Using the work leak is being very generous, considering the pipes under the sink weren’t attached to anything so the water running from the tap just poured into the cupboards, and eventually onto our floor.

Once we got that sorted out (What, you mean you have connect every pipe?) our problems moved onto to smaller, more nagging things. For example, our landlord didn’t think we were mature enough for a tap with an extendable hose, so instead of purchasing a faucet without this feature, he decided to tie down the one we did have. This MacGyvered solution resulted in a small but constant drip from the twisted and tied cable, which we temporarily solved by putting a sauce pan under it. What was our landlord’s permanent solution? Giving us a larger bowl to put under there. The rationale? The bigger the bowl the less often we have to empty it.

Most recently, Richard and I were doing the dishes when our feet were suddenly very wet. Immediately, we both blamed each other for being clumsy and spilling something until we realised we were not holding anything spill. We opened the cupboard to see that the main pipe was completely unattached to anything important. I freaked out (because I had just spent several hours cleaning the floor and now it was all wet with dirty food water) and stormed straight over to our landlord’s late night curry take-away shop. I walked in and he smiled, to which I said “This is not a happy visit.” His smile faded.

I figured we could fix it ourselves, it was just a mattered of screwing the pipe back together, but I was so fed up with everything in this brand new house falling apart that I wanted my landlord to spend his own time fixing it. So, he came over right away and put it back together. It took him five minutes and he chatted to Richard as he worked. After we left I asked Richard what his excuse was. Apparently he said that it was caused from the friction and that, quote, it happens. Um, what? I’ve never owned a house before but I’ve lived in one and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

This brings us to present day. All of our taps are currently fully functioning and all of our pipes are attached to other pipes. I’m living the dream, really.