My dining room may be fabulous but the plumbing sucks.
Last night I helped Harrison out of the shower & turned off the water. (He was mad because he likes to turn off the water but you know, sometimes I forget & act on habit like all moms.) I toweled him off & the water kept trickling from the shower head because sometimes that happens for a few minutes when you own a 20-year-old house that was a misused rental for a decade.
But after teeth were brushed & jammies were put on & a fast book was read, Doug & I stood in our bathroom side-by-side staring at the shower. The water was still streaming, despite multiple attempts to shut the faucet off completely. I tend to get really stubborn when I can’t force an inanimate object to do exactly what I want, so while Doug turned off the water by the knob in the downstairs toy closet, I stayed upstairs still flipping the handle up & down, up & down to no avail.
For the first 20 minutes, we convinced ourselves it was water leftover in the pipes but at more than a trickle, leaving it be for the night was like watching dollar signs stream out of a 20-year-old faucet. Doug started getting the OMG-THIS-HOUSE crazy eyes that make him do insane things like rip fire alarms out of ceilings & remove all the mulch from our front flower beds.
The crazy eyes make me feel guilty because let’s be honest, it was me that fell so hard in love with this house. So I try to diffuse how he’s 2.5 seconds away from ripping the house apart board-by-board by finding a solution, which usually involves watching DIY YouTube tutorials.
“We need to turn off the water at the street!” I announced & Doug’s looking at me like, no shit, I said that 10 minutes ago. So there we were, throwing random items of clothes on top of our pajamas & trudging through our front yard at 10pm with flashlights & wrenches. It looked suspect at best. Doug popped open the little metal underground box that houses the water main thing & he gets the wrench on &…nothing. The darn thing doesn’t move, thanks to a complete lack of torque & 20 years of properly paid water bills.
After 5 minutes he’s like, “This isn’t working” & starts heading to the house to find another tool & I’m like THE HELL IT ISN’T. Like I said, I tend to get angry at inanimate objects. So I grab the wrench & it must be all that Body Pump I’ve been taking in the evenings, or maybe it was the stream of profanity that effortlessly fell from my lips in that moment, but the darn thing turned like a charm.
(note to self: send apology notes & a box of cookies to the neighbors.)
This morning we had no ability to flush toilets or make coffee, which briefly impacted my quality of life. We paid a plumber $125 to come look at the shower & sure enough, the handle & valves were so corroded that they couldn’t turn all the way & now the whole thing has to be replaced by going through a wall in the closet, starting tomorrow.
I know our house gives Doug the crazy eyes & I admit that sometimes I get the same twitchy feeling, but it’s ours & it’s where we’re building our life. Squatting in our front yard in mismatched pajamas, looking like fools, I realized that there’s still nobody else I’d rather be on this adventure with.
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