The downside of being an overwhelmed home owner
posted in Frenzied Daddy |“Daddy, can I have my bath, and take my dollies? You can bring the laptop upstairs.” Someone has to keep an eye on the smaller kids in the bathtub (The TT is 4 and she might drown! ). So, yup, I ran her bath, turned on the laptop, started getting back into the project I was working on for work, when the hot water ran out and I went to turn it off.
And turn, and turn and turn and OH MY GOSH it’s not turning off!
I ran downstairs to shut it off at the hot water heater. “Daddy,” she called, “it turned off by itself!”
Luckily, I’ve replaced that washer in the tub often enough that I can pull the faucet apart fairly easily. I know what parts come off and what order. Of course the washer was wrecked – it’s been dripping for a while but the five minutes that it would have taken were spent on the stupid computer. But that usually causes a drip, not an inability to turn off the water. I played with the parts a while and discovered that the valve stem, for lack of a better word, was stripped. So off to Home Depot I went at eight at night. I bought the part (had to match it up against the one I removed, and it turned out to be the cheapest valve stem at $10!) and reinstalled it — it took about five minutes to put the faucet back together.
The faucet is a familiar task. It’s kind of like when we had the oil furnace and I’d have to replace the oil furnace’s spray nozzle filter thing. It was a little gold filter that basically screwed onto a pipe between the oil tank and the furnace. Without it, the furnace wouldn’t run and the house would get cold. Without being able to turn on and off the water (especially off), the morning showers would be cold. But because I’ve done it before I had the tools and more importantly the knowledge on how to fix the problem.
I don’t feel “manly” very often but fixing the faucet sure felt manly.
