Why Plumbers are Expensive

Wherein Our Heroine Flirts with DIY Disaster.

Sometimes, the most innocuous-sounding suggestions are the worst ones.

John and I got our brains sucked by Lowe's Saturday morning. It is one of the few explanations that makes sense of the rest of the weekend. It was not the normal brain-suck, where you decide on a project and somehow forget to get a vital tool or bit of hardware to complete the project. It was the suggestion of and acquiescence to a project that is simply insane to begin with.

Let me back up a little. Our house was built in the mid-80's, and most of the fittings can be described as "contractor's specials." You can probably imagine: the bathrooms have plate-glass mirrors affixed simply to the walls, with a long Hollywood-style strip of dressing-room lighting along the top. Stair railings are big, chunky pieces of timber atop a prefabricated metal assembly of stringers and uprights. All the original sockets and switches in the house are "almond." Worst of all, the lavatory taps are those faceted plastic "crystal" balls that you swivel and fidget with until you get the water temperature you want. Since there is no tactile reference on these orbs, it is entirely possible to scald the living bejeezus out of yourself if you turn on the tap without visually checking its orientation while the dishwasher is running and the pipes are full of ready-to-go hot water. Not to mention, they are intensely, aggressively, inscrutably ugly.

So, early Saturday morning, standing idly at Lowe's I asked John the seemingly innocuous question. "How hard would it be to swap out the taps in the master bathroom?" And after a long process of choosing appropriate taps and bringing them home, emptying out all counter surfaces and cupboards, cleaning out gag-inducing traps, hacksawing through the old drains which were fused, going back to Lowe's to get supply hoses (as the old ones were welded instead of screwed), finding out that the taps we had originally chosen would not work because the mechanism that works the drain stopper was too far back to slide down into the hole, returning yet again to Lowe's to pick out different taps that would hopefully work, installing new taps and drains, returning everything to the surfaces and cupboards, turning the taps on to find out that the drains weren't screwed down tightly enough, removing everything from the cupboards and mopping up the water, screwing down the drain in my sink to make it work properly, not being able to get John's drain to screw down enough to work properly, returning to a local hardware store for better advice, coming back with plumber's putty and re-installing the drain, finding it still doesn't work, then finally jamming as much plumber's putty around the offending area as possible to stop the leak and putting everything back into the cupboards, we now have new taps in the master bath.*

I think I'm going to have to learn to live with the rest of the "crystal ball" taps in the rest of the lavatories in the house, though.

*Our Heroine must note, in all fairness, that most of this two-day odyssey was performed by Our Hero.

7/14/2005 ETA: The coda to this story can be found here.

Posted: Monday - November 15, 2004 at 07:11 AM | |