Pressdog.com

Don't Try this at Home

By Bill Zahren
( Posted 02/12/01)

There are a few key rules in plumbing:

1.) Copper pipe is soft.
2.) When something doesn’t turn, “put your back into it” isn’t always the best idea.
3.) “Hand me that sawzall” sounds a lot like "give me $500."

So there I was on Saturday, February 3, sitting on the edge of my bathtub looking at my dripping tub faucet. It had been dripping for about a month. Taunting me in the morning and every time I sat my considerable butt on the toilet. Drip-drip-drip. Well, today was the day of reckoning for Mr. Leaky Faucet. Today was the day a real man fixed his own plumbing.

Hey, my father is an automobile mechanic. Mechanical ability is in my blood. I’ve changed sparkplugs in my car before. I’ve changed my own oil many times. I once installed an upper radiator hose on a 1973 Ford LTD, Mister. Of course, fixing a car is not the same as fixing plumbing.

One of the key differences is that a car doesn’t have a million gallons of water running through it, ready to inflict major collateral “water damage” if you screw something up. Even now, the water in your pipes is biding its time, waiting for an excuse to transform a pinhole into a torrent that floods your house and drains your bank account.

Oh, water is a trickster. It’s Liquid Evil in your house. You can’t survive without it, but there’s no more vicious enemy to homeowners, especially out here on the tundra where water freezes and expands and snaps concrete like balsa wood.

So much of house maintenance comes down to one word: drainage. Keeping water where it’s supposed to be. Clearly (the corporate way to start a sentence), we had a water problem with this dripping faucet. Disaster waiting to happen, is what that is. So I pulled out my jumbo pliers and grabbed the faucet in a manly fashion and applied a little torque.

Didn’t turn. Oh yeah, well, I gave it a little something extra. It turned a little. Ah ha! Bending to my manly musculature! Still resisting, though. Time to get to my feet and use my back and my legs to turn this stubborn screw-like device. I been working out you know.

So I dug in like a batter facing Roger Clemmons, my Doc Martins gripping the dry tub floor, I breathed out a couple of times and gave it the 250-pound-bench-press heave. Oh, I’m a powerful little man. The screw-like device turned easier and easier until I was unscrewing it with smug satisfaction.

Just get that off, disassemble the dripping value deal, race over to Lowe’s and have this done within an hour and save myself about $70. I removed the handle thing, looked in the resulting socket and saw what looked like two small copper tubes swirled around each other like a twist tie.

I couldn’t have been more surprised if I woke up with my head sewn to the carpet. I sat back on the edge of the tub like a mule had kicked me in the chest. Sweat started beading on my forehead. The next word out of my mouth rhymed with “truck,” as did the second through the eighth words, followed by “you stupid (word that rhymes with ‘pass mole.’)”

I’d twisted off the copper pipes that feed water to my shower faucet valve. The only thing I’d done right was turn off the water first, so I didn’t get a face full of water to go along with the humiliation of screwing the (rhymes with "miss") out of my plumbing and being forced to run down to the basement to turn off the water.

Oh, I’m the Do-It-Yourself Bull, that’s for sure. So now I got a big hole in my wall. About the size of two footballs on top of each other. Big gaping hole that, every morning when I wake up, looks at me and says, “YOU ARE A PASS MOLE.”

After I went ahead and twisted the (rhymes with "quit") out of my plumbing, I took a break to hyperventilate a little bit, stood over the toilet as I teetered on the edge of hurling, and then ran downstairs. I had to get someone over here to do emergency surgery on my mangled pipes so I could turn the water back on to the house.

I called Rick. Rick is the guy who took care of my leaking crapper pipe. The pipe that drains my bedroom crapper had a hole in it and was leaking tiny amounts of, ah, effluent. It turned out that the cable guys, when my house was built eight years ago, drilled a hole for the cable right through the crapper pipe in the family room wall.

We figured out something was wrong when Haley called me at work and said, “DAD, there are mushrooms growing behind the TV.” Make a note -- mushrooms growing anywhere inside your house is a bad thing. The crapper leak was enough, ah, fertilizer to get the tiny mushrooms growing.

Rick fixed the pipe and floor and helped me get cash for the repairs off the cable people’s insurance company. So I called Rick. Rick sent over his dad, Cliff. Cliff came over and eyeballed the situation with the calm of an emergency surgeon.

“OK, well, we’re going to have to cut a hole in your wall,” Cliff said, as if he was saying “We need to get gas in the car.” “Because if you take out your shower to fix that, you’re talking major expense.”

Cliff. Let’s never talk “major expense.” So Cliff measured it up, drew an “x” on my wall paper, just above the laundry hamper, and got out the “sawzall.” It’s a little sawed-off shotgun looking tool. Took Cliff about 40 seconds to saw a basketball-sized, gaping maw in my wall.

Then he sawed through the copper pipes and capped it off so I could turn the water back on. Cliff is coming back sometime to throw the $90 replacement valve in there and then patch the hole. Right now, of course, he’s in the Bahamas working on an orphanage. Cliff would be a wild man in an orphanage. Teaching the kids how to spackle and run the sawzall. He’s a sheet rock surgeon.

Next time something’s dripping, I’ll just walk ‘round to the other side of the wall and kick a big hole in it. Save everyone some time. Maybe some day I’ll have a sawzall of my own. Until then I’ll just live with the hole in my wall and use the alternate shower until Cliff comes back from the Bahamas and makes with the solder and spackle.

Truck.

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