I've been trying to figure out a coherent and complete-ish train of thought about this, as I think it's interesting,
When we arrived at our Moscow apartment, the bathrooms both stunk. Nothing terrible, just a faint stink of sewage and mold. The only time I have smelled an equivalent bathroom smell in the US was a couple times when I've lived in houses with a bothroom undergoing remodel. They have outside-ventilated fans running 24/7 in the bathrooms, which is good, but though at first I was dismayed about the poor plumbing there though confident that I could fix it, I've come to realize that plumbing is an unsolved problem in this part of the world. HSBC in downtown Moscow, the nice clubs in downtown Moscow, the bathroom in this newly-built nice beachfront hotel in Ukraine... All have the same stink of mold and sewage.
When I was trying to get the shower cabinet re-plumbed in our apartment, I thought that the obvious (OBVIOUS) choice to go for the parts to do it was OBI, the big German chain of DIY stores that are very similar to Home Depot's. I can feel at home in a Home Depot anywhere, I thought... I needed some very simple parts. The project in question was a shower cabin/cabinet/something - basically a one-piece shower unit that is actually super cool. It just takes a hot/cold in, power in, and drain out. It then has a regular overhead shower, a little handheld shower thingy (ubiquitous here), and then a wall of shower jets that spray you from the side. It seemed a few of the jets had been broken off by one method or another, and probably it had leaked out the drain? When I got to it it had about 80% of the plumbing removed, but was pretty standard. It had a few half-inch threaded connectors, then some smaller - probably 3/8" hosing to run everywhere. Most of that was gone, as was the drain pipe. So what I needed was a bunch of the hosing, and a few "standard" connectors. A couple of threaded nipples, some hose clamps, and a drain tube - that was actually the tricky part.
Very, very strangely, I found this not to be the case. I am still not sure what the root of the problem was - but I think it's that their market is totally dominated by a couple of mostly proprietary systems. Imagine that you need a connector that is 1/2" threaded one one side, then a nipple for any reasonable tubing size. Piece of cake to find at Home Depot, right? Getting one that has a 90˚ turn should only be nominally trickier, too, I'd think. We even had one I'd pulled off the shower - we needed 2 more. Chumped out at OBI, despite the fact that they had 2 full aisles of plumbing stuff. They had what looked like all the parts you would expect, but not what we needed. We finally found something that had some promise, but had about a 5 cm nipple sticking out of it. This needed to go on the side of the shower, so would probably not work too well, but I got one to see if it would come close to working. For getting the piece we needed, the helpful OBI employee told us that we should really go out to the Moskva rynok - which is a mixture of flea market and shopping center where there would be 20 different plumbing stalls with each vendor having 90% of the same inventory and of course no prices on anything, you just pay what the guy decides to charge you...
The drain situation was a whole 'nother nightmare... The drain of the shower was standard-ish, and was threaded for a 2" outlet, but the thing was, there was only about 3" of clearance between the bottom of the shower cabinet and the floor. You obviously couldn't use a straight piece and bend it 90˚, even though basically all plumbing here seems to be done with that cheap flexible plastic tubing. We spent about 30 minutes talking to the plumbing guy at OBI and he was totally stumped on the situation and said that, too, would be best found at the rynok. Now, mind you. We are standing there next to the shower cabinet section, where they carried about 30 different shower cabinets, at least 15 of which had identical plumbing requirements. I mean, you point to the shower cabinet and say, "I need the piece that would go from right there to the wall, you are selling that thing there for 15,000 rubles. If I buy it for 15,000 rubles, how do I move the water from there to the wall?"* The best answer we could get was, "I don't know, ask someone at the rynok."
The rynok was just as bad in general, where just language problems and trying to explain to Ira who doesn't know the right words in either English or Russian to describe the parts and requirements of the situation was so stressed out it was just horrible. I got a bunch of parts that somewhat met the requirements and decided to try it out.
That day wound up being an unmitigated failure. Though the guy at the rynok had said that this drain pipe would work to turn the 90˚ turn at the drain outlet because it is flexible, it needed at least 4x the clearance I had to make that turn - I couldn't seem to communicate to anyone that there was only a 3" or so space in which to make that turn. The parts kind of fit but the tubing we'd gotten (even though we had a sample, we got something fairly close but not quite right) was not so excellent, and the only part that kind of worked was that hugely long nipple, though it would need the cabinet to be held out about 9" from the wall to prevent the tubing from kinking.
The next day, I went back to OBI with a different mindset. First, I was going to avoid any staff, because I could figure out the requirements. Second, I was going to not be looking for a part that I had in mind to begin with, but see how what they had there met the similar requirements. I wound up finding that the drain situation had been that apparently in the time between that other shower cabinet being installed (maybe, 5 years ago) and today, someone figured out that you should trap the drains so that you don't have sewer fumes coming up out of your shower. Thus, there were about 7 different drain kits that were for just want I needed, but I'd ruled them out because they were all way too deep. As I mentioned before, I had about 3" of clearance, but these would take probably more like 7". No problem, I could just lift up the shower cabinet. At least maybe this would help with the smell.
I also realized that the new plumbing standard that Russia seems to have adapted was that instead of nipples and hose clamps, it's all just compression fittings. So I'd been looking for something too simple, and found the compression fittings I needed no problem. I had the parts I needed and was ready to go when the friendly young kid who had helped us the day before came to help again, and we shoo'd him away.
So now I went home and all my plumbing on the water-in side of things got wired up spectacularly. The drain was good, but I needed to elevate the shower. It's a tricky scenario because I needed to get some bricks or something to raise it the few inches it needed, but then needed to still be able to slide the thing in and out. We went to the rynok and just got some bricks (and then took a bus home that didn't quite go as close to our house as Ira wanted it to, and though I suggested we get off when we were about a 5 minute walk from the house, Ira insisted that even though we were driving away from there, he had said he would drop us off on our street and wound up about halfway across the city). I then asked Ira what the street we lived on was named, and she didn't know. So who knows what she had been talking about with the bus driver to find out whether or not he was heading toward home. We got there though, with a big potato-sack full of bricks on my back, got the cabinet propped up, plumbed up, and I was very proud. Now just time to leak-test.
Now, a careful reader of this epic tale will realize that I have now worked on most of the key functional parts of this shower. I have plumbed the drain myself, piped the water around to the different nozzles myself, and the only thing I didn't actually touch was the critical part - the two valves. One of the valves controls the temperature/flow of the water, and the other controls which way the water is routed. Those two valves were one large assembly and I'd just hooked up the input and outputs to that. It is also, I know from plumbing my own shower in my last house, the most expensive part of the assembly. Well, we turned the water on at the source to send water to the cabinet and no leaks appeared. Success there. I then turned on water flow into the shower and water spraying everywhere back behind the cabinet. I squeezed back there and had Ira turn on the water, and found that the valve/manifold assembly, which looked to be one large piece of brass, was spraying water everywhere.
I lost.
Now, it should be noted that I was the third person to try to fix this problem. The renters who had been living in the house had tried and failed to fix it, Ira's dad had tried and failed to fix it, and then I guess just took a ton of the plumbing off and lost it, as it was just GONE. I don't know how or why one would start to take the tubing apart if the manifold is spraying water from itself, but they did, and I followed along and though I was able to complete their project, it was ill-fated from the start.
After 2 days, much stress and spending probably $80 on random plumbing supplies to try to fix that situation, we decided to just replace the whole thing for the 15,000 ($500) rubles it will cost to get a brand new one with warranty, etc.
My hypothesis about why all the bathrooms here stink is that there is no such thing as a licensed plumber. You don't need a *license* to plumb. If you think you know how to, you do it. Every handyman is a plumber, electrician, etc. Nobody would ever dream of inspecting your plumbing in the house you are building to see if it is up to "code". There is no code, no rules, no regulations, and thus life is lived in a perpetual cloud of sewage and mold.
* A side note. All the buildings I've stayed in are built of concrete. I haven't even seen a building that was not built of either concrete slabs or, as seems common here in Ukraine, these large stones that are mortared together then coated in concrete - walls here are on average 14" thick. Even most of the interior walls of our apartment are concrete. Thus plumbing is a little interesting. Each wall with plumbing has, coming out of the wall, a receiving tube that takes just a friction-fitting. Sometimes there will be a couple of the drains, but they are there and immovable (since they are encased in concrete).
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