Monday, June 11, 2007

Why do I ever attempt plumbing?!? At least there's a mojito waiting for me...

There is a rule in our house: I do the electrical work, and Von does the plumbing. Except today I got a wee bit over-frustrated at the drip from the outside faucet, which really isn't outside, it's under the crawlspace, and I broke that rule. And the results caused me to remember WHY I do electric and Von does plumbing.

Apparently it's been dripping for a while and we just never noticed it, except it's gotten worse. So what did I do in my attempt to see if I could fix it, since I couldn't wait one more minute for Von to get to it? I broke off half the handle, and made it so we're losing even more water.

The only good thing that came out of my aborted attempt to stop the drip is even though there's even more water coming out than there was before, most of it's now coming out of the faucet instead of around the handle, so I was at least able to attach a hose and route that to a planter so that the water's not idly hanging out in our crawlspace tempting nasty things to live there.

And of course the faucet was rigged by the previous owners in a way that's going to be a real bitch to fix: Everything under there is PVC, which in theory should make it easier, but there's the house shutoff then basically no space at all before the T-connector to which the metal spigot is glued into place. Yes, I said glued into place. If they had given a little more room, then even someone as plumbing-impaired as I am could have just cut the PVC to either side of the T-connector and put something else in its place. But noooooooo, it couldn't possibly be that simple.

So now we have to figure out a way to fix this mess, and as long as we're under there I'm determined to get it routed to outside of the crawlspace, which means piping it to the foundation, putting in its own shutoff valve (what a concept!), drilling through the blocks, and installing the new faucet. Which of course neither of us really know how to do but our lack of funds trumps our lack of experience and lack of desire to do this ourselves.

I hate plumbing.

And I've been working on the floor again today which hasn't helped my mood at all.

At least I got us some steaks for the new grill for tonight. Grilled steak, grilled brussels sprouts with olive oil and rosemary, and grilled fresh peaches over dulce de leche ice cream. Can I hear a YUM? And I think a mojito will be in order, too - after all, the mint I have in the fridge will go bad soon if I don't use it up!

Oh and the blue we chose for the bathroom looks really, really nice. I'd describe it as kind of a faded denim color. Since we got a whole gallon for that little tiny room, I think we'll paint one of the third floor rooms that color as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

what a mess!
Thank you for reassuring me that my crawl space could be worse. I've been cleaning it out gradually over 3 weeks, and I seem to be the first one to have tackled this job since 1912 or whenever they started dumping rubble beneath the floor.
Glad you found a hose-