Home Destruction

I'd been bugging J to come to Home Depot with me for a few days. "I want to make sure that you pick exactly the shelves you want," I told her "and I think you need to be there in person." She always found a reason to put it off, however, such as "if I'm not here to take the cookies out of the oven they'll get burnt to crisp and set the house on fire" or "both of your children haven't napped in twelve hours and are screaming their lungs out in the backseat" or "it's illegal and dangerous for both of us to leave the house without an adult present."

She agreed yesterday morning that we could make a trip first thing. I needed to get a replacement exterior spigot, since our old one had been continuously dripping ever since we moved in. There was a massive icicle off of it all winter and when the snow and ice finally melted I had to put a five gallon bucket on the ground underneath to avoid a perpetual muddy mess just outside the back entrance of the garage. I disliked this, and looked up information on how to replace the old spigot with a new one that didn't leak.

The internet is a great resource for rookie homeowners like myself, because there are lots of youtube videos and do-it-yourself tutorials for every conceivable problem. I'd had a string of successes attempting home fix-it projects recently, including some pretty complicated repairs along the lines of:
1) hanging pictures on a wall
2) hanging different pictures on a different wall
3) fixing James' marble run

The point is that I had developed hubris. Hubris doesn't just mean pride--it's insolence to the gods. I don't know which deity I offended when I spoke to J the other day, but somewhere on Mt Olympus a cloud-gathering brow was furled when I declared that "You know, all this home repair stuff isn't rocket science. You read the instructions carefully, you make sure you have all the right tools, and as long as you've done your preparation beforehand most of it is just a matter of familiarity with the process." I was just begging for a smiting.

This is why I was quite confident yesterday morning that I could successfully replace the spigot by myself. Step one was to turn the water off to the house, a task I completed confidently and without issue. (There's a big yellow lever right next to where I practice with a black arrow pointing down that says "OFF") Next I needed to unscrew the old spigot and bring it into Home Depot with me so that I could make sure the replacement was the right size. As I was heading outside, J asked me "How long exactly will it take before we leave? I want to make sure that I can time Owen's next feeding just right." "Well, it could be 20 seconds, and it could be 20 minutes. You never can tell with these sorts of things." How humble of me.

This is where it all fell apart. I brought James out with me, because everything is way easier when your three-year old is attempting to help. He held a hammer, and he swung at the spigot whenever my hands were out of the way, and occasionally when they weren't. I sprayed the threads with WD-40, gripped the pipe with one set of pliers, then attempted to wrench the spigot loose with another. Pound, pound, pound, went James. Nothing was loose yet, so I sprayed some more lubricant and wrenched harder. I looked up the directions again, and as is always the case, the instructions made the process look easy and straightforward. There was no word at all about a spigot that wouldn't move. I pulled harder on the pipe and felt something move. Then I gave a yanking tug left and felt the spigot come free, along with the rest of a pipe. And then I heard water spilling from inside the basement.

J was feeding Owen at this point. She heard a noise in the basement, and footsteps hurrying down. She heard concerned climbing, scrambling, and James asking "Why's that all wet, Daddy?" It was not a reassuring experience for her

I had broken the 1/2" pipe leading to the spigot. Fortunately there wasn't much water to drain out of it, but I saw that because of the angles of the pipe there wasn't much chance I was going to be able to pull it through. I attempted a couple of different tacks, without giving much explanation to J about what was going on--"Well, it doesn't look too bad down there...hmm...I didn't expect that...I wonder what..."

Eventually I gave up on trying to get the spigot unscrewed. As I learned later, the "spigot" didn't screw onto the pipe behind it all, but was all a single piece called a "frost-proof sillcock." I don't know the origin or meaning of the word "sillcock," but I'm fairly certain that "frost proof was an inaccurate descriptor.

There was more experimenting with trying to remove the pipe and to shut off the water to just that set of piping, but that just led to water gushing out all over the basement floor. Eventually we had to give up on turning the water back on before we left, which meant that James couldn't have a drink. (He was thirsty after all his hammering) and J couldn't wash her hands after changing Owen's diaper or her face before heading out into public. It wasn't a particularly cheerful ride to Home Depot.

From a family relations perspective, things didn't improve once we arrived. I couldn't find any of the equipment I needed to complete the repair, largely because (as I progressively discovered) I hadn't the fainstest idea what I was doing. Both of the plumbing specialists had called in sick, and my first attempt to call J's Dad wasn't picked up. Owen was cranky and awake in the carrier, and James was asking about the name and purpose of every piece of merchandise in the store, most of which were completely opaque to me. Eventually he gave up on asking questions and just waved his Greek flag around in the cart, shouting at the top of his lungs that he'd scored a goal in hockey.

We found some other things that we needed, and then when I got ahold of Dad he talked me through one solution that would involve some complicated sets of parts requiring precise measurements and perhaps a blowtorch, and another solution that involved capping off the broken pipe until someone who knew what they were doing could get a look at it. I chose option B, and picked up a Sharkbite slip on fitting. I wasn't exactly sure I had the right measurement for the pipe (do you measure outside to outside, or inside to inside? What if you get a different measurement every time you hold the tape measure up? What if your three year old is hitting you in the shin with a hammer while you take the measurements?)

It turned out to be a simple fix. We got home, J took the screaming Owen inside, James ran outside to wave his flag some more and and celebrate his hockey triumphs (or Greece's hockey triumphs, I suppose) and I went down to the basement with the fitting. I had to finagle (that's the technical term for pushing really hard) the fitting on, but when I tentatively turned the water back on, the fitting held. We had water again! I came back upstairs and declared triumphantly to J "It worked! I fixed it!" As she washed her hands in relief, she asked whether the exterior spigot was working too. "Well, I fixed it in the sense that there's no longer water gushing into the basement and the house is in worse shape than it was this morning at the time I first emptied my toolbox...but at least there isn't any water gushing into the basement."

At that point I decided I would take a bit of a break from attempting my own repairs, at least without some really thorough research and perhaps some expert assistance.

That resolution lasted until 4:00 in the afternoon, when I decided that installing the new doorknob on the bathroom door couldn't possibly be that hard. J was busy with something, perhaps teaching, and I brought both of the boys up with me. I opened up the instructions and glanced over the first page. Installation time, 15 minutes, I read.

I'm learning to take those estimates with a grain of salt.

To my credit, I even double-checked the process in a large Home Maintenance reference book I have on a bookshelf downstairs. There were lots of colorful pictures of a man using a screwdriver, then pushing together the two knobs of the lockset and screwing in the faceplate. Easy, right? The boys could even play together next to me while I worked.

This particular repair was necessary because the inside handle of our bathroom door had broken off sometime before we moved in. This made it difficult to even close the door completely, and impossible to lock it. With a three year old whose favorite adjective is "curious" roaming the house, this made privacy almost impossible. For both J and myself, it's a regular event to have James pull open the shower curtain as you're attempting to wash yourself off and ask you a question that he needs your help with right away, the floor and boy getting soaked the whole time, and then once you tell him that you don't know where his "favorite roof slat" is, to get some helpful comment along the lines of "Hey, you're really wet." About intrusions during toilet usage we will not even speak.

I attempted to read the instructions as James began bringing all of his worldly goods into the bathroom to show to Owen.
1. Mark door edge approximate 36" (914mm) from floor. Fold the template along fold line. Place center of template on marked position. Not relevant to me, our door already as the lock hole cut. Let's skip this.

2. Drill 1/8" (3mm) pilot holes as marked in step #1 for both the 2-1/18" (54mm) and 1" (25mm) holes. I don't think this applies to my door either. Let's skip it.

3. This step is for interchangeable latches with face place converts to either radius or drive-in. Not applicable to mobile home latch. You know what, I think I'm just going to start unscrewing.

The unscrewing part went fairly well, although J began to get nervous again as she listened up the stairs and heard things like:
"Well, how's that supposed to come off?
"James, don't cover Owen's head with that blanket."
"Hmm...well, that could be painted over."
"Owen, don't eat the trash, that's siwwy!"
"Oh, Owen, stay out of there."
"Oops..well, I think that would be covered up anyway."
"Wait, what's all that wood doing there?"

I managed to get the old knobs off with some prying, and discovered there was lots of...random wood?...still in the middle of the door. Enough so that I couldn't fit the knew knobs into the old lockset, which had been my time-saving intent. As I was going up the stairs with a drill, J wisely decided that now was a good time for her to take over the supervision of James and Owen. She asked when I'd be done, since she wanted to go on a walk.

"Well, the instructions say fifteen minutes..."

She's learned to take such things with a grain of salt as well.

I started looking further down the instructions to see if there was any information about what to do in my random wood blockage...

5. Press exterior knob/lever against exterior surface of the door making certain the stems are positioned horizontally so they go through holes in the latch case. Note: the exterior knob has blah blah blah, you're holding a drill, turn the drill on. The drill is fun! You know what you're doing! You won't mess it up!

An hour later, as we got ready to go for a much shorter walk, I triumphantly declared to J that the bathroom door still didn't really lock very well, and that the knobs didn't move particularly easy, but if you pulled really hard you could shut the door and that at any rate there were knobs on both side of the door now.

When she asked what the problem had been, I gave the highly technical explanation that "There turned out to be a lot of door in the way, and the pointy things wouldn't fit through, and then when I opened up some holes using paddle bits (I think they were paddle bits) to push those through there was some more metal in the way, so I had to take everything out again to get rid of some more wood, and then the screws wouldn't quite go in right...so..."

So now I really AM off of home repairs for a good long bit. At least until we put in the corner shelves this afternoon.