Austin360 blogs > Bottlecaps & Wingnuts > Archives > 2008 > June > 10 > Entry
Forecast: Continued showers
I used a pair of pliers — needle-nose, even — to turn on the shower Tuesday morning.
This is, Shannon would probably not want me to omit, not a permanent thing.
No, as our house closes in on 20 years, we just had a small fixture foul-up.
This close-up of the faucet handle shows how the interior plastic thingamajig broke, as well as the general state of crud on the interior of the faucet handle.
This happened on Monday morning. As I turned off the shower, the faucet handle gave way, preventing me from fully stopping the flow of water.
My FIRST thought was that if I had to call a plumber, I was going to have to clean the bathroom, because our master bathroom is, quite simply, the foulest place on earth.
Perhaps I exaggerate slightly, but having the kid means we have reduced our housecleaning procedures to only the most essential elements. When we have guests, they don’t see the master bedroom, so it doesn’t get cleaned. If we do manage to clean the master bedroom, we don’t quite make it to the master bath, because, well, who really wants to clean the bathroom?
At this rate, I kind of look at it as we’re preparing a state-winning science fair project for a fifth-grade boy. I can hear the judges now …
Why Jenkins, this lad has developed a culture of rainbow mold!
But I quickly realized that a plumber was not necessary. I fetched the pliers to turn off the water and made plans to go to Home Depot that afternoon to fetch a replacement faucet handle.
This is not the faucet handle I purchased on Monday afternoon. No, I bought the wrong size one, which I had to return on Tuesday afternoon.
That I would buy the wrong faucet handle on Monday was a predictable development. I was in a hurry to get the repair done before I headed to work (so I would not have to arise at 6 a.m. and show Shannon how to turn on the shower with the pliers on Tuesday morning).
It was predictable and, of course, fulfilled two of the requirements of any Thomas household repair:
A) All jobs require at least 2 trips to Home Depot.
B) Everything is harder than you think.
On Tuesday, things worked a little better. We got the right size handle and I was able to prowl around Home Depot with the boy pointing out useful things such as pick axes and nail guns. (He was actually only impressed by the lighting aisle, which, come to think of it, would be stunning to a small child. Your typical room has one light fixture and this aisle has hundreds of them.)
The new fixture has this intact plastic sleeve which fits around …
… this brass doomahickey which serves as a valve for the water.
This was simply a matter of sliding this over the brass valve and screwing it into place, although the instructions on the faucet handle packaging said I should turn off the water supply — for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.
When installed, the new faucet handle was the cleanest thing in the bathroom by an order of magnitude.
(Neat phrase, huh? I borrowed it from my friend Bret, who in turn borrowed it from Bill Bryson.)
Kind of makes one want to clean the rest of the bathroom to match, right?
No.
Still, it sure beats showering with a pair of pliers.
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