One Man's Loss ...

[Arfa Daily]

I recently did a full refit of my main bathroom. I found a place in the nearby town that had an incredible range of tiles and bathroom fittings at unbelievable prices. I bought a really high quality 'stylish' bog, complete with soft-close seat & lid, and close-coupled cistern with a high quality dual flush valve ready fitted, for less than the cost of a B&Q 'Bog to Go'. I also bought an extremely elegant and high quality large basin and pedestal for about the cost of a halfway decent pedestal on its own from elsewhere, and a really high quality solid brass / chrome plated monobloc mixer tap - the sort that you would normally pay 150 quid for if you were that daft - for around fifty.

I asked the guy in this place how come his stuff was all so cheap. You can tell that it is, because the place is all the time full of dodgy-looking property developers :-) and the guy has a calculator welded to his hand to do his 'deals'.

He told me that it was because they were bringing the stuff in by the container load, and it was being made in the United Arab Emirates. The boxes confirmed that this was indeed where the stuff was coming from. It struck me as being a bit of an odd place to be getting it from, but I thought little more of it, until the breaking news this last weekend, of the deep shit that Dubai is in. It would seem that just about all of the ongoing building sites are now closed down, and an apartment that you would have paid $10M dollars for 2 years ago, is now worth anly 2 or 3 $M. It was then that I got to thinking that when the building there was booming a year or so ago, there must have been huge orders placed with manufacturers out there, for high quality bathroom fittings, and that now, those manufacturers are left with warehouses full of the stuff on their hands. And I guess that's where people like the guy where I got my stuff from, come into the equation. I bet that they buying this stuff at real rock bottom prices just to get it off the hands of the manufacturers.

So, poor old manufacturer's loss, my gain ?? Can't think of any more feasible reason why stuff of this sort of quality, could be being sold on here, at such knock-down prices ...

Arfa

[A.Lee]

No. They (UAE) are big exporters of ceramics, and have been for a few years. RAK are, according to their web page, the biggest ceramic company in the World. I have fitted a lot of their stuff in the last year,and it is good. It can be had reasonably cheaply, and they do 'different' designs from the European makers, so some of their stuff looks distinctive. B+Q were selling a lot of their stuff recently, at around double the price I get it from the local Plumbers Merchants. Alan.

[Cicero]

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Check what you buy very carefully (RAK) as the packaging appears to be rather inadequate. I bought a bathroom suite and most of the contents were rattling around in very flimsy corrugated cardboard. Good value though.

Cic.

[Arfa Daily]

I stand informed !! Well in that case, it's no wonder that manufacturing is going down the toilet (pun intended !) in this country. Comparing the stuff that I bought and the price I got it at, to some of the home-grown crap I've had over the years, and what I've had to pay for it, there's no contest ...

Arfa

[Owain]

Sort of Morgan Computers for bathrooms?

Owain

[Arfa Daily]

Interestingly, the tiles I bought from the same place - 30cm x 60cm, so big muthas and sodding heavy at 28Kg per box - came all the way from China. The packaging was unbelievably flimsy. A thin vaguely corrugated box, with a single very thin sheet of low density polystyrene, between each tile. It's a big bathroom, and I have tiled from floor to ceiling, so a lot of tiles, but for all the dubious packaging, not a single tile came out of the box damaged in any way. When you think of them being in a container on a ship crumping up and down for weeks on the ocean, then all the craning, transport by truck on the dirt tracks that we laughingly call roads now, then being un-containered, shipped again, de-palletted and then moved in the guy's van, and then the back of my car, I find it quite remarkable that there was no damage. And the quality control and manufacturing was exceptional. Not a mark or rough edge or glaze-spot or any other kind of blemish. Also, total consistency of colour across the two designs I used, even though they were bought in small batches over several weeks, and were shipped in for me from their central warehouse.

With performance like this, it's no wonder that Chinese manufacturing is taking over the world ...

Arfa

[Adrian C]

Er, 'bog shifters' ...