Adventures in Plumbing

/ Jeff Cann

I saw a meme on Facebook the other day:

Plumber Rates
$150/hour
$175/hour if you watch
$200/hour if you help
$250/hour if you started the job first

This was surely one of those creepy cases where my phone eavesdropped on a conversation and tailored content to match my interests. Susan and I talked about plumbers last weekend. Frustrated, with tools and plumbing parts strewn across my bathroom floor, I told Susan, “Sorry, no water in the master bath until we can find a plumber.” I’m squarely in the $250 range. Yesterday, I hired Donnie, a friendly, self-deprecating guy my age, to fix our shower. He took over where I failed. In my defense, he pointed out three areas where the original installer broke code, making it harder to fix.

The other obvious problem is I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m pretty good at faking it. As a new homeowner in the nineties, I gamely swapped out our 1940’s electrical outlets for the new-fangled grounded ones that became common in the sixties. On the other hand, I also bought a blowtorch and solder to repair the fifteen feet of exposed copper pipe below my deck that didn’t make it through winter. After a weekend of failed attempts, I passed the torch to my father-in-law and never tried again. But in general, if something breaks, I give it a shot before calling for help.

This one seemed so easy. The showerhead leaked intermittently. The dripping at night kept Susan awake. My hearing started fading fifteen years ago. A dripping shower doesn’t bother me at night. Without my hearing aids, I can barely hear my alarm in the morning. But the noise drove Susan nuts, and the showerhead was layered with corrosive gunk. We should have replaced it in the early twenty-teens. On a quick trip to Lowe’s, we bought a nice nickel-plated replacement for $119.99.

People like me who do home repairs without any training or know-how become accustomed to that “oh crap” feeling when we suddenly realize we’re in over our heads. For my shower fixture replacement, this was when I snapped my angle grinder wheel into pieces when I had cut only halfway through the handle.

Somewhere right now, I suspect a plumber is reading this and thinking “What the…?” If you’re an old school DIY person like me, and you flip through your dog-eared 1990s copy of the Home Depot Book of Home Repairs, the shower fixture section makes no mention of an angle grinder. My solution was the equivalent of a doctor taking a machete into eye surgery. Step one to replacing a shower fixture is to remove the handle. This is done with an allen wrench. Unfortunately, the little hole with the allen wrench bolt was filled with twenty years of soap scum, shaved leg hairs, mold, and a billion decayed skin cells. The gray-brown muck was impenetrable.

After digging at it with a safety pin for twenty minutes, I could sense the general hex-shape of the bolt-head at the end of the pin. I tried the allen wrench. I could get it to settle into the head, but it slipped when I tried to twist the wrench. More poking and digging with the pin, same result. Forty minutes later, the bolt was stripped. I tried to drill out the bolt, I broke the drill bit. I tried again and broke another bit. That’s when I grabbed my angle grinder. If I couldn’t remove the bolt, well, I would just grind it down to dust.

It took me five hours across two weekends (a Sunday and then the following Saturday) to get the handle off. That’s when I learned that the original plumber made some, er, unorthodox plumbing decisions. It took Donnie three more hours to complete the job. If I convert his three professional hours into Jeff hours, I would still be working on this in March.

Donnie was a good sport. He called me into the room from time to time to point out the code violations and other weird plumbing techniques he’d never seen before. He even gave me to tips on how to make this repair by myself in the future. Despite my starting the job and then being somewhat present during his repair, he told me he would charge me the standard rate. I’m not sure whether this weighed into his decision, but I mentioned to him that I’m the guy who writes the check when his company does plumbing work for the library… something that happens almost every month.   

21 thoughts on “Adventures in Plumbing”

    • I’m glad too. My daughter is moving home today for the winter. One bathroom wasn’t going to hack it. Plumbing contains a level of artistry that is beyond me. I don’t think people give plumbers enough respect.

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  6. Way back when I owned a house, I tried wallpapering the kitchen. I pulled out the fridge for a practice area, and then pushed the fridge back to hide all of the “air bubbles” in the wallpaper. I eventually finished the room, but it was not a good experience. I now freely admit that I am not “handy.” Glad you had a Donnie to fix things. 😊

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  7. I like that you passed the torch to your father. Usually that happens in reverse and is more metaphorical in nature than literal. Congrats on coming to your senses and hiring Donnie. I have a neighbor who helps out when I’ve tried to fix things. Twice now he’s repaired my kitchen sink from when I tried to remove the ‘u-bend’ and instead broke the pipe off the sink altogether. (I swear it is designed deliberately to do that!)

    Best of luck in the quirky old house repairs. I feel your pain every time something breaks that shouldn’t have been done that way in the first place. Next up for us, is a new kitchen floor–that is if we don’t grind on through to the basement with our kitchen habits of screeching the chairs back from the table after eating.

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  8. Oh my goodness, Jeff. This gave me a good laugh. I love the way you are able to laugh at yourself. Although this is going to sound extremely sexist (sorry!), I’ve been dying to ask. Is this a male thing? I always wonder “why?!” My first instinct is always to ‘call someone’ because everyone who we would call is trying to support their family so why wouldn’t we call? But my husband always has to try first–and his attempts are much longer and far less successful than yours and we end up with a mess that is so much bigger than the original that it costs us far more than it would have… I shake my head every time and wonder… so I ask. You’re a good sport. I figured I could ask you. 🙂

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    • Well it’s mostly about being cheap. I feel if I can do it myself, I’m being lazy if I don’t. I should probably give up on plumbing though. It’s clearly beyond me. I never try to fix cars myself.I should have embrace that attitude elsewhere. Happy new year Cyn.

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  9. Zsor-zsor had a good laugh at this Jeff. Maybe she had someone close to home in mind too that spurred a few extra chuckles.
    ~
    She’s doing all prescribed physio and speech therapy and coming along bit by bit, but words are few. Nevermind, I think her laughter encompasses her response.
    Kind regards
    D & Z

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    • I know I’ve written this before, but I’m so honored when you tell me that you read my blog to Zsor-zsor. Learning that it brightens her day is seriously a highlight of my week. Keep doing the good things you’re doing.

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  10. I find it easy to read your posts to Zsor-zsor in an animated but naturalistic way. I do Australianise a few expressions but it’s your fine writing that captures her interest and gets the laughs, Jeff.
    That’s also why we had a handful of regular listeners at Calvino cafe at the Rehab Hospital on Saturday mornings, when Zsor-zsor was there. I reckon those eavesdroppers are still missing your Letters from America.
    Thank you Jeff.
    Kind regards,
    DD

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  11. Pingback: Adventures in Plumbing - Mind Move

  12. I appreciate that you can find humor in these situations. I never get that far, since my first instinct is to find someone else to fix whatever is broken. We’ve lived in our house for nearly 40 years, and I just hung up pictures all by myself for the first time about two years ago…

    Happy New Year!

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