We rock – and by “we” I’m using the marital we. This weekend, Kevin and I became plumbers. Not just any plumbers mind you but MASTER plumbers. What? You doubt our claim to the MASTER title? Then see below…..<\/p>\n
Last week, Kevin noticed a leak in the shower. After you turned off the water, there was a slow but persistent drip that continued from the head of the shower. We fiddled with the handle and the shower head to no avail. The drip continued to haunt us. Having no experience with plumbing, we decided to call an expert. After three missed appointments, he showed up, looked at the shower and told us that he could fix it. He’d have to cut a whole in the wall and replace a section of pipe and it would cost us $450. Four hundred a fifty dollars!!!! And get this, that didn’t include repairing the hole he cut in the wall. His suggestion was that we hang a picture over the hole if we didn’t want to pay to get it fixed. I don’t think so.<\/p>\n
Kevin showed him to the door pretty quickly and we hunkered down to decide what to do next. It took us .00001 seconds to conclude that for $450 dollars, we’d try it ourselves. So we hit the books. Actually, it was Black & Deckers’ Home Projects 2000. For a mere $35 bucks we got a book that showed us not only how to do plumbing , but how to complete another 1999 projects with color photos. How cool is that?<\/p>\n
So we flipped to plumbing and learned that we didn’t need to cut into the wall. All we needed to do was replace the O rings and\/or cartridge in our shower. That’s right, for a mere .90 cents for new O rings and $8 bucks for a cartridge, we were on our way to a non-leaking shower. With a plan in place we leapt into action. I actually woke up at 9am on a Saturday (and yes, I am ok, no major injuries from the lack of sleep so far) and we started to work. First task, turn off the water.<\/p>\n
And then we hit our first road bump. The book said to turn the water off at the “shut off valve”. Right, the shut off valve, and that would be where exactly? It took us an hour and a half to locate the shut off valve in the basement. The problem was, the shut off valve didn’t have a handle so we kept passing by it saying, “that can’t be it, it doesn’t have a handle.” (Duh.) After a lengthy process of elimination, we realized that HAD to be the shut off valve. Closer inspection revealed there was a handle. It was sitting right next to the valve where someone had put it after they had broken it off. That’s right, they had cranked it too hard and snapped the screw that held the handle to the valve. Kevin tried to use a wrench to turn the valve off but we learned why the handle was snapped. The shut off valve didn’t work no matter how hard you cranked.<\/p>\n
So the gloves were off. We weren’t going to be stopped by a mere valve. We decided to go to the source. That’s right, we hit the water meter. Actually, I hit the water heater because Kevin was too squeemish to put his hands down into the muck with all the spiders and slugs. I unburied the main valve and Kevin cranked it shut, drained our pipes of water, and began operating on the shower. After a few choice cuss words and a lot of plumber’s grease, we managed to replace the valve. When the water was turned on, there was dead silence in the shower. No drip. We had succeeded!<\/p>\n
Since it was 2pm, we decided to take a break and celebrate with lunch. It only took 5 hours and $43.08 (plus miscellaneous wrenches which we won’t count in the total since they can be used in other projects). And that, my friends, is why we are MASTER plumbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We rock – and by “we” I’m using the marital we. This weekend, Kevin and I became plumbers. Not just any plumbers mind you but MASTER plumbers. What? You doubt our claim to the MASTER title? Then see below….. Last week, Kevin noticed a leak in the shower. After you turned off the water, there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Kqhb-5O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrissierocks.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}