I’m getting good at this!
Plumbing, that is.
Yeah, I was doing more plumbing this weekend. I had a shower upstairs, in my daughter’s bathroom, that had been running hot water for days, or weeks, before I noticed. I really don’t have any idea how long it had not been turning all the way off, but it’s been a while, anyway. I’d tried to get at it earlier in the week, but I couldn’t get stuff apart right and had to let it go until Saturday.
The kicker to working on this, though, is that I have to shut off the hot water to the whole house, because I can’t find the shutoff for just that shower. So, I waited until my wife got her shower then, I set to work. That was around noon. Several hours later, I managed to get the valve apart, but at the expense of obviously needing to replace the whole thing. *sigh* Well, that meant a trip to Home Depot. I got all my parts and got it together, only to find that the water was still running! So, I shut the whole thing down, again and open it up, again. This time, I shined a flashlight into the opening and found that there was an actual hole worn through the interior connection! Well, I guess I’m getting the hang of this stuff, because it occured to me that an O-ring would take care of that. And, I was right! It did!!
But, somewhere along the line, I managed to snap off the handle on the hot water shutoff at the water heater. That meant I had to buy a whole valve just to get the handle. And, the process of turning the hot water off and on seemed to knock loose some iron/calcium deposits, because my downstairs bathroom sink got clogged up. Grr! Of course, I took the whole stem valve apart before I figured out that it was the difuser that had gotten clogged. By this time, it was around 5:00pm and I was tired. So I quit for the day.
This morning, I discovered that I had missed a washer in that downstairs sink, which had kept the water running until I turned it off under the sink. So, I got that together and, lo and behold, it all worked! So, it might take me twice as long as a real plumber, but I do manage to get the job done!! Now, I have some fall-back skills if this whole computer thing doesn’t work out.
Of course, there’s always the lottery!
