Home Repair

October 10, 2010

My wife will tell you that some home repairs shouldn’t wait. Really. And while I might have a reputation here in the Desert Southwest for procrastination, even I can see when it’s time to haul ass to the Home Depot for plumbing supplies.

It started out as just another simple task on the honey-do list. Years ago, when the house was first built, the designers at Patio Pool, in their infinite pool design wisdom, installed plastic knobs on the outdoor sink. I suppose the design guy thought they were pretty.

But within a few years, the Arizona sun made short work of those knobs, turning them into just so many shards of acrylic debris. I considered picking up all those little pieces of plastic and mailing them to the corporate office, but by then the dog had eaten most of them.

So for some time now, we’d been the proud owners of a wet bar that was never wet. It’s a good thing the sink was plugged as well, otherwise we would have been really pissed at our being unable to use this wise investment.  

For months I’d managed to avoid fixing the thing, figuring I would wait until the drain finally cleared before tackling the faucet. But after waiting since early July for the Liquid Drano to do its job, I decided I could shirk my duty no longer. So I grabbed a beer from the fridge, an adjustable wrench from the garage, and headed out to the patio. Today I would master this intolerable plumbing situation, and tonight we would celebrate with a barbeque.

What a mess. The sink was filled with a witch’s brew of months-old grease, rainwater, drain cleaner, and several hundred crickets and now mutant June bugs which had kamikazi’d their way into the drink. Yuck! I decided it would be easier to cleanup the sink’s noxious contents if I had running water, so I proceeded to unscrew the fitting which held the remains of the handle in place. But even after removing the nut, the little piece of plastic underneath wouldn’t budge.

I started back to the garage for a needle-nosed vise-grip, but halfway there I heard the Nordic Warrior Queen hollering at me from inside the house. Nothing new there, except I heard the words “water” and “turn the fucker off!”

I hurried back to the sink to find a ten-foot high column of water geysering from the hole where the little piece of plastic used to be, but which had now been ejected via water pressure into low-earth orbit.  Worse, the sink with it’s load of toxic waste was now overflowing onto the bartop, the grill, and the patio deck, spewing chemical-resistant beetles and highly concentrated acid everywhere. I frantically searched for the shutoff valve only to discover that my friends at Patio Pool had neglected to install one. Shit!

My only hope was the main shutoff valve at the front of the house. I ran for the back door so I could cut through the living room but of course my wife the compulsive door-locker had secured the house just minutes before. So I reversed course and swung around the back corner of the patio, through the gate, up the side yard and into the garage, slapped the garage door opener then ducked underneath the still half-open door as I hurried to the front yard. There, the shutoff valve!

But alas, some giant of a construction worker had installed this thing years before. I should have known. What his tremendous strength had started, the heat of the Arizona summer had finished. It wouldn’t budge. I scrambled back to the garage, searched through toolbox drawers which hadn’t been opened in decades, and found there at the bottom the mother of all plumbing tools, a two-foot long Monkey wrench.

By now I could hear my wife inside the house, screaming in terror as she hurriedly inflated a survival raft for her and the boys. Water was spilling into the front yard and down the street. There wasn’t much time. I ran to the shutoff valve, opened the toothy maw of the Monkey wrench to its widest, and clanged it home. Giving it my all, I pulled back on the handle; with a tremendous metallic squeal the valve finally surrendered. With just moments to spare, I twisted the valve shut. The waters receded.

Over the next three hours and with repeated trips to Home Depot, I rebuilt the bar sink plumbing, installed two new valves with shiny metal knobs, snaked the plugged drain, and cleaned the hazardous waste from the backyard. It was too late by then to have a barbeque, so we ordered take-out.

Next time, I’m going to call a plumber.

P.S. In a never-ending quest to chronicle my sad and often ridiculous humanity, I managed to shoot a small video of the sink (click on the word sink). I’m sorry if the video is sideways, or won’t play on your computer: blame Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but don’t blame me.

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