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The Barbican was a bit like that when I worked on a flat there. A special plumbers merchant round the corner could have anything made or source the really unusual parts. That was about 20years ago too.
Airhead-
The Barbican
I love those flats.
Royal Doulton (Edit: it’s Twyfords and you can still buy them but I think they’re NOS) still make those weird but excellent vertical basins.
😂I got lost leaving a flat there in the early hours very much the worse for wear with (now ex) Mrs. Bird, we literally wandered around trying to find a way out for a lifetime until we heard footsteps and ran to them in desperation.
absurdbird
Yeah, sad.
Built in obsolescence is depressing.
Repairing your leaky kitchen mixer tap with a 20p O ring is fucking golden though.
The replacement parts or whole thing are so cheap (and often shit) that repair is pointless or impossible.
I called an appliance repair guy out to fix a Miele oven, he said it basically wasn’t worth the repair, I asked which he recommended- ‘the cheapest one that works, they’re all crap and break in 5 years’ he said with a devastated look.
I used to manage a 1929 apartment building in the States.
I was the live-in Super. 🙂
I could still buy parts for the concealed shower/bath mixer valves from the same company in Michigan that made them 70 years before; valve seats, washer jumpers etc.
I was keeping these 1930s bathrooms working.
Same with the apartment door locks, I could order new cylinders and whole mechanisms, exact matches for the originals.
Mind you that was 20 years ago, and things were very different then.