Questions about French showers and fittings

A couple of other tips for you.
It’s a good idea to seal over the shower tray drain before starting work with Duct Tape. This will prevent any small dropped parts, or other debris, from causing a future blockage in the waste trap.
Additionally, may I suggest that you cover the shower tray and surrounding floor area with some padding such as old towels or folded dust sheets, and then lay some boards, plywood, or at a pinch, thick cardboard on the top. This will prevent damage to the shower tray and floor by dropped tools, debris, and also whatever grit may be adhering to the bottom of your footwear. Bathrooms are a bit of a pain to work in as it is so easy to chip something with a dropped wrench or other tool.

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Good advice.

Someone tried to make the upstairs bathroom a sort-of wetroom with ‘Italian’ shower on a floor with no official drainage and from the look of the ceiling below, some un-official drainage. The floor is tiled, but probably onto wooden boards. :rage:

It would be very convenient to have a shower in there, but the ceiling slopes and is quite low. There may be a creative option with a curtain that will work in the space without excessive leaking. We may also put a bath in there if the floor underneath looks OK. I’m just really frustrated at the apparent complete lack of thought about placement (toilet immediately beside the shower tray, making stepping out awkward) and the really poor quality of fittings used and the way stuff has been actually fitted. It’s all visual effect only, to look like a new bathroom.

Once we have the kitchen done then I’ll probably start work on the bathrooms to make them pleasant to use.

Yes, one does come across some ‘interesting’ bathroom arrangements here.
When we moved in here it was clear that there was provision for a washing machine to be placed at the end of the bath. Flexible hose for filling the machine that just pushed onto the bath taps, and an electrical feed cable that was loosely looped along the bottom of three walls to provide some power to an outlet that just hung on the end of the cable on the floor. Now it was earthed cable, but of course it came from a socket under a light switch that had no earth. How on earth they managed to run a washing machine from a lighting circuit goodness only knows. The only safety protection seemed to be the crucifix hanging on a cupboard door. Additionally, the bath was sited under the window (chilly in winter), and despite the bathroom being quite large, there was no toilet in it at all.
All quite curious really. Needless to say it has now all been taken out and re-organised to make the room safe and more comfortable to use.

If you do end up fitting a bath, then a couple of lengths of scaffolding board placed under the feet will help to spread the load across a greater area of the floor. Also it raises the bath up a little, which as we become more mature, is often not a bad thing to do. You might wish to consider building a load spreading plinth to raise the bath up to whatever height you would find most convenient. This can also be helpful to provide more space for the waste trap under the bath.
Our bathroom being over an integral garage, the waste pipe takes a vertical drop directly off the bath plughole and goes right through the floor so that the waste trap is actually accessed from the garage below.

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Maybe something like this?

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Yes. Is that glass panel custom-cut? Our room is narrower than that, probably around 1M wide, although that may not prevent a shower being used similarly. We’ll have to gut the room completely to look like that.

I would guess it is custom made.
I have a similar issue to you, so have been collecting ideas.
Here are two more:

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I’ll post a picture of that end of the bathroom later.

French husband is a plumber here in France, I’ve shown him the photo asking how would he remove the shower. He says there’s a screw, usually underneath (but could be on top). It’ll have a cover to hide it. Turn off water, undo screw, remove, easy eh? He cringed when i told him there was a douche italienne upstairs! Good luck

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Fantastic, thanks Chriss. I’ll re-check for a cover in a few weeks when we’re there again.