And I don’t mean the British comedy from the 1980’s (OK-the 1970’s, but it aired in the US on PBS in the 80’s when I was an impressionable tween-hmmm, the starting of my frugality perhaps?)
Yankee Bill left yesterday for a guys weekend with his buddy Craig at the Barrett Jackson car auction in Scottsdale AZ. (He is not authorized to purchase anything-this is simple a look and drool event) He was actually supposed to leave on Sunday, but due to bad weather his flight plans changed several times.
Well, yesterday evening, in a fit of New Years organization (more on that in a later posting) I decided it was time to tackle that black hole known as “under the sink”. Yes, you all know it-those strange nooks and crannies of space that all your cleaning products and other weird items get stuffed in an around the assortment of pipes, tubes, disposals and such, never to be seen again.
This is a task I’ve been meaning to do (and thus far avoiding) for a few months. But I gritted my teeth and pulled it all out.
Now how did I manage to accumulate 3 different cans of aerosol oven cleaner? (and anyway, I’ve recently discovered the much healthier alternative of just using the self cleaning oven. duh.)
2 packages of disposable gloves and multiple orphaned yellow reusable gloves.
Sample sized cleaning products.
Sponges.
More sponges.
Where did all these sponges come from?
Didn’t I just buy sponges last week because I couldn’t find a sponge anywhere in the house? What are they breeding under here?
Then I saw it, Water. A puddle of water.
Uh oh. This isn’t good.
Even though I was a maintenance officer for 11 years in the Army, I myself am not particularly mechanically inclined. I do better at the management of maintenance and overall large scale logistics rather than the turning of actual wrenches myself. But even I know that a puddle of water under the sink is not a good thing.
Now I’m faced with a slight dilemma. We bought a new dishwasher on Veterans Day from Lowes and had it installed. (a little known fact-Lowes usually has 10% off for all veterans on Veterans Day. They don’t advertise it, you have to go in on the day and ask about it. Good thing to know if you need to purchase a large appliance). The leak looked to be coming from right where the dishwasher line went into the rest of the pipes. However there was also another valve there.
My dilemma-if I called Lowes back out, and it turned out not to be their installation, but rather my plumbing, then they’d probably charge me for the call, plus not fix it. If I called the plumber they would be able to fix it either way, but if it WAS the dishwasher line then why pay the plumber when Lowes should fix it for free?
If Yankee Bill was home, he probably would be able to tell what was going on by looking at it. I didn’t want to worry him while he was gone because he can’t do anything about it from AZ~so I decided to wait and tell him about it later.
I called my one friend who’s husband is very handy with this sort of stuff.
Conveniently her husband also gets laid off for 2 months every winter and would be home.
Inconveniently he just left yesterday as well for 1 week.
So, I went next door and borrowed George, my neighbor.
We have great neighbors on either side. The ones on the right are twice retired-the first time from the military-so even though there are about 40 years difference in our ages we bonded immediately. George is a handy guy, and I remember him telling me about how he had installed a toilet for his son-in-law a year or so ago. I figured that this would be a man who would be able to tell me if I needed the plumber or the dishwasher installer. (Side note, have you noticed that a lot of our generation is NOT handy? I think this is a big loss)
Not only did George come over and look at the pipes-he also repaired the problem, free of charge! He said that that packing of the valve was bad, and that it could be repaired by turning off the water, taking off the valve, wrapping dental floss around it, adding a little sealer, and putting it all back together. He walked next door, picked up all his tools (even brought back over his own dental floss) and proceeded to fix the problem for me in about 20 minutes flat.
Now, has God blessed me with awesome neighbors or what? I say that man and his wife deserve a homemade Schnitzel dinner at some time in the near future.
I totally agree with your side note. I think that perhaps as our society got more affluent, people started paying others to do things they previously would have done themselves. Couple that with the increasingly complex nature of our everyday technology, and people like my husband, who can fix anything, become rarer and rarer.