The Rules of Plumbing
We don’t have many rules down here on the anarchic South End. Don’t need em, don’t want em, won’t obey em anyway. But there IS one unwritten one, maybe not something Moses brought down from the Mountain, but if he were around today, he’d probably make it the 11th Commandment: Do NOT do plumbing prior to arriving guests.
Plumbing looks easy. Seems like you take off a coupler here, exchange a faucet, replace a gasket, nothing to it…. If you think that, you’ve never done plumbing and you don’t live down here at the butt end of an island where the nearest plumbing parts are 10 miles away and the nearest SERIOUS plumbing parts stores are 40 miles away. Plumbing Repairs for the Complete Idiot states emphatically: no repair project requires LESS than 3 trips to the hardware store. It is a Law of the Universe, right up there with E= mc squared. It is inviolable. I know, believe me, I know.
I got company coming tomorrow. Don’t ask me why, but … yeah, I broke the 11th Commandment. I thought it would be a no-brainer, a piece of cake, a walk in the park. Just pull our old pitted pedestal sink and replace it with my new 100 year old mint-condition porcelain beauty, a $12.50 score at the RE-Store. All I had to do was disassemble the brass fixtures, put em on the new one and voila’, a Martha Stewart golden moment.
Course, the old parts, being 100 years old and corroded beyond belief, proved a bit recalcitrant, but I patiently worked with pliers, screwdrivers, vise grips, monkey wrenches, hammers, hacksaws, spit, curses and pitiable prayers to the implacable gods of plumbing. Half a day later I had the old sink literally in pieces. The pieces, of course, didn’t match up to the new sink. You can trying mating disparate parts of corroded brass with stripped threads in multiple arrangements, but … guaranteed, they won’t mate up, not in an hour, not in a day, not in the puny time left to you and me in this human lifetime.
So I went to the hardware store. Not once, not twice … you KNOW how many if you believe in PHYSICS. Meanwhile, our company is en route. I guess they can wash up with the outside hose. I suppose they’ll be understanding. Or … maybe this just a South Ender’s strategy for shortening their visit.
Hits: 170