Plumbing Pain

Well the bathroom has died the death and the corpse has been buried in my breezeway. The old nasty room has been torn into bite sized pieces, bagged and thrown out the door, paving the way for the installation of the shiny new bathroom.

The installation, however, is not going as well as it was supposed to. My skills with electrickery are still as good as they need to be and my faith in my plumbing skills were shaken, but have survived intact. I have installed literally miles of pipe before and have been fortunate not to have created leaky systems before. This all changed on Saturday. I crafted a nightmarish maze of pipes, valves and elbows all with great care since my wife and I, like most people, don't enjoy basements with the water contained outside of the plumbing systems.

I stood back and admired my handiwork with a sense of great accomplishment and pride. I swaggered over to the main shutoff in my trademark cocky manner and opened the valve while patting myself on the back for a job well done. It was at this point, with my arm on my back, that I felt the water strike my armpit. I shut the system down to repair the leaks that had shown their ugly heads and patched my leaky handiwork.

I then reluctantly crept over to the shutoff and turned the valve again, dismayed to see water dripping from the "repaired" joints. It is at this point that I am glad that the family is away as the job site turned rapidly into an NC-17 location. I tore it all apart again and examined the components only to find that 4 of the 12 elbows that I had purchased from a certain orange signed store with holes in places there shouldn't have been! While I felt better that my plumbing skills were still decent I was dismayed to see that most of Saturday had slipped away. I ran out to a different store and bought the non-leaking variety of elbows that I prefer to use and resoldered everything to a preferred non-leaky status.

It was at this point that I called the cavalry. The cavalry said that they had more important things to do, and the horses were tired so I told them to get bent. Then I got a phone call from the renovation king himself, the Jodster. We destroyed the remaining bathroom and after putting up a huge fight, the bathtub was wrenched from its hole like a rotten tooth (although unlike the puuling of a tooth the screeching sounds were from us instead of the tub). Sunday went much more smoothly (day of rest my backside), but with the lost time on Saturday the tiles have yet to go around the tub. Damn you orange renovation store!!!! Maybe I should ahve told them that the home improvemtn was for me and not my fish, then I would have had supplies theat resulted in a dry job!

Tonight tiles, tomorrow the world!

Dear lord, I'm tired.