Home Repairs

For someone who works with their mind for a living, I have had a fascination for home repairs for many years. When I say I had, I say it in the same sense an alcoholic says he used to drink. I used to do home repairs, but I have been dry for some time and with any luck I will stay that way.
When you are newly married and poor, you believe you can do any repair. Some of the repairs I went looking for, while others were thrust upon me - there was the time I asked Sydney what the bulge in the ceiling drywall was in the entry area of our old home. The roof was old and it had just rained heavily. How much water could be trapped there anyway? So I poked a hole in the drywall with a screwdriver to let the water out, and voila! The ceiling collapsed dumping a lot of water and drywall on the floor and creating a ceiling and roofing project for me.
Recently, I put some new fixtures in our upstairs bathroom shower. New handles, downspout, shower fixture, and drain. A simple procedure. You take off the old hardware, put on the new, and there you are. The following weekend we had some young women guests as part of a youth conference, and they used the bathroom for showers. A perfect stress test of my work. I went into the garage while they were showering, and discovered we could have saved water by having one of them take a shower under the garage ceiling using the water that poured from the ceiling. It would have already been soapy for them. How could changing the drain do that? I was going to tear open the ceiling but called a plumber instead. He checked the bathtub drain and said the “shoe” was askew. Who knew a bathtub had shoes? I removed one drain and put another in and the bathtub threw a shoe like some frisky horse?
We had a kitchen faucet that was leaky so instead of doing the rational thing and calling a plumber, I decide to fix it myself. Unfortunately, to remove the valve, you had to crawl under the sink and disconnect several pipes then disassemble the valve so you could remove it from the sink so you could pull it apart to get to the interior piece that was the likely source of the mischief. I took it to the plumbing supply house where they were kind enough to sell me the new piece for the valve, and then the clerk said in a by the way you probably already knew this tone of voice, “You unscrew the top of the valve and pull the old stem out and insert the new one then screw the top back on.” The top of the valve! You mean the top unscrews? You mean you don’t have to take apart everything underneath the sink lying on your back with water dripping in your face trying to unscrew a fitting with one hand and holding a flashlight with the other. What made them think I didn’t know that?
Of course, if you’re not bright enough to manage plumbing, there is always drywall. I’ve done drywall. I’ve done it because my sons learned how to put holes in it early in their lives. I’ve stepped through dry wall ceilings while putting boxes in the attic. Don’t let anyone tell you insulation in the attic covers anything substantial. It only covers drywall, and that is not substantial, at least not compared to the weight of a person resting on one foot on the drywall. It surprised me and it surprised everyone in the room below. Well, you cut the drywall around the damaged area, then you cut a new piece of drywall to fit the hole, you nail it to the nearest piece of wood behind the hole, then you cover the gaps around the edge of the patch with drywall compound or tape it with drywall tape first, paint it, and it’s fixed. The final step is to hang a picture over it to avoid awkward questions. That's why ceilings are more difficult - you can't hang a picture.
I once put about a half dozen holes in the ceiling of our dining room in search of a leak that had come down through the chandelier over the dining room table. I needed to make the holes to get a good look at where the leak was coming from since the wet spot may be the end point of a stream of water from elsewhere (see entry ceiling discussion above). It looked for a while like we had had a particularly wild frat party in that room. Eventually, we discovered the leak was coming from one of the valve handles in the shower above and down through the wall. Why would someone replace the gasket on that valve and fail to put the proper washer in it before tightening it down? I was pretty upset about that until I thought about who did it.

As I said above, I have given up home repairs for the most part. I can do a toilet float valve in my sleep, and I’m still pretty good with lightbulbs and such, but no more plumbing and I think drywall and painting are finished, also. I would volunteer to help my children as they work on their residences, but I don’t want to destroy any relationships, so I think I’ll just supervise.