Plumbing
I’m feeling like maybe I should have become a plumber, as I’m getting pretty good at figuring out what’s going on behind my shower (in ways that the plumbers who actually came out to look at it and give estimates on seem to have missed). It looks like the problem is just with the connection between the shower head and the valve. It’s possible that with the right tools it’d be possible to just open up the wall a little bit to gain access to the valve side of the pipe to tighten (and maybe re-tape) it, and then the shower head end might only need the drywall to be opened up to have that connection tightened as well. I might not need any retiling at all! That would be ideal, at least.
Anyway this is stuff to go over with the plumber next week.
The plumber who did the “quick fix” and diagnosis on tuesday, incidentally, made a couple of things a lot worse, and I just ended up having to replace my tub spout as well (because he installed it with loc-tite on the faucet end for some reason, even knowing that this was meant to be a temporary fix). Oh well, the one I replaced it with is much nicer looking. The pipe leading to it is a little bit too long now, though. Do I need to cut it down and get a threading tool or something?