A few weeks ago, Deus Primus posted about a plumbing job that he had to do. I've posted it below for your enjoyment:

Let it be known far and wide that I have decided not to be a plumber!!!!! Not that I was seriously considering this occupation as my dream job, but on the offhand chance that the idea may have slipped into my mind at some weak moment of contemplating the potential glory and honor derived from such an occupation, even this infinitesimally slight possibility has been forever killed, destroyed, nullified, annihilated, extirpated and quelled. (As a disclaimer for any readers who may have relatives, friends, or vaguely known acquaintances who are plumbers, and may be offended by my remarks, please know I have an enormous amount of respect for members of this long and distinguished profession, God simply decided not to grant me the abilities needed to excel in this field. [As you will soon read.])

Some of you may know that the faucet in the "Boy's" bathroom has not been working for a couple of months. This has led to the rather inconvenient situation of a mixed gender bathroom for the various times that water and a sink are needed, such as brushing one's teeth or the gelling of one's hair. (Did you know that the imperfective tense of "to gel" has to "L"s in it? Very strange. It makes me want to ask what "gell" means.)

In an effort to end this unfortunate standoff between the genders of our house, though I might add that the fair females of our family have very graciously accepted this intrusion (Could I expect anything less from the lovely ladies?), a faucet was purchased to take the place of the non-working spigot. In truth, this was the second such faucet that was purchased, it was found during an attempted installation that the first did not fit in the area allotted for its habitation. That occurred last month; the turnaround time is quite lengthy in the faucet world.

With a correctly fitting faucet in hand, I decided that an hour or so could be spared in my schedule to take care of this small project. (Ha!)

First, the old faucet needed to be removed. Sounded simple enough, so gathering my wrenches about me I attacked the various washers and nuts with a fury that would have made the Mario Brothers proud. (Before they entered the princess saving business, Mario and Luigi were plumbers, ergo the many plumbing related items in the game.) It should be noted that there is no conventional adjustable  wrench that expands to the width needed to remove the round thingamajigs that are attached to the underside of a faucet, this is learned by experience. Also learned was that you can remove them if you twist hard enough, while yelling for them to release their death grip on the pipe.

Once the faucet was off I made another disturbing discovery. Whoever makes the faucets found out that they can force the unsuspecting self-plumber to also change the drain at the bottom of the sink, regardless of whether this needs to be done or not. This is done through the cleaver method of making each drain the same color metal as the faucet, instead of a generic color that matched the sink. This has the effect of making it rather difficult to replace the faucet without someone noticing the drain. (I can just see all my brothers standing around looking at the drain saying, "Isn't that drain the same color as the last faucet?"). Not wanting to be criticized as being deficient in my duties I next tackled the drain. With the first twist of the pipe wrench the entire sink shifted two inches to the right. Even I with my limited plumbing knowledge realized that the sink is supposed to stay in one place, not be floating around like a soap bubble on the surface of the dishwater. It turns out that the grout was cracked, and now I would have to reattach the sink to the counter. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, I decided to pull up on the sink, since it was no longer attached anyway, and separate the pipe this way, instead of wrestling with them in the rather cramped spaces under the sink. This worked well, until  the plastic u-shaped thingy that attaches to the bottom of the sink snapped in half. Ok, now I had another thing to fix.

At this point I was about to renounce hand washing for good, maybe advocating going back to the old method of rubbing our hands in the dirt to clean them off. In the interest of preserving my heath and well being I decided to work on the other sink. What other sink you ask? Perhaps I forgot to mention that the "Girl's" sink had a minor leak, not a huge problem, simply enough to make life annoyingly difficult for the person in charge of cleaning said sink. That meant that this faucet was also being replaced, and since it was a simpler design, it should be really easy to replace, right? For those of you who said right, please join me in the optimist's group, we are wrong, but at least optimistic.

The faucet lulled me into a false sense of security by coming out quite easily, but the sink hit me with reality (which feels about the same as being hit by a 2X4, for those of you who were wondering) when it also decide that it if its fellow sink could break from the restrictions of being attached to a counter, then by-golly it was going to do the same. Now I had two sinks to re-mount. (At least the u-shaped thingy stayed intact.)

Not to be put out by such a setback I replaced the faucet, which turned out to be easier then the other was becoming, and turned on the water, much pleased that even though there had been several setbacks, one of the faucets was going to be working. Hearing a hissing noise I leaned over and saw that the hose which connects that funny looking valve to the faucet had started leaking. (I didn't know it was possible to reach such a high note during a scream.)            

Again, someone decided that replacing just the hose would not be satisfying to the home-repair person, so they make the hose one piece with the valve, if one breaks you replace both. (I can hear their sardonic laughter now.) At this point I needed supplies, and that meant a trip to the hardware store.

There are few stores that I do not like. In fact, I can count them on one hand. Hardware stores are one of those few, spending money there, when it could have been spent on books, or saved for my world vacation, seems so unfulfilling. However, it had to be done. I ran in, got the needed supples, and ran out with all the haste fitting such an event. Once I got home I noticed that four hours had passed since I started the project. My first hope was that my watch had broken. Alas, this was not so.

Replacing the valve and hose required my turning off the water. The rest of the family was outside planting plants (Someone has got to come up with another word for planting, it seems so redundant when paired with "plants"), so now was an opportune moment for such a task. (At this point, please be so kind as to remeber that the main valve to turn on and off the water is in the garage, and the bathrooms are on the other farthest most end of the house. This will prove important later.) In a valiant effort to follow Adam Smith's rule of specialization, I decided to remove the valves from under the other sink at the same time as the one I was finishing up. (Both of the valves leaked under the boy's sink.) Having removed those, I returned to the girl's sink and attached the evilly designed valve, hose combination. Just as I was tightening the connectors, my dear brother Anthony asked if he could turn the water back on to take a shower. Since this valve was already replaced, and I was gluing the sink, I gave him the green light to proceed. Soon I hear the sound of running water in the boy's bathroom, assuming that it is Anthony preparing his shower. A few moments later I see Anthony strolling down the hall towards the boy's bathroom, which strikes me as odd, since it sounded like he was already in there. Soon he starts yelling that there is water pouring out from under the sink. If a member of the Olympic running team had seen my sprint to the bathroom, I would be going to Beijing next summer. I emmediately grabbed the nearest wastebasket, and frantically tried to catch the flood eminating from the wall, at the same time screaming for Anthony to turn off the main valve. Anthony should also be going to Beijing, but again we had no witnesses. Once the water was off we surveyed the damage. Most of the water had been soaked up by the rug, which held almost enough water to end the current drought in Australia.

Sticking the old valve in the hole we turned the water back on, and Anthony started his shower while I finished up the girls sink. This finished, as well as Anthony's shower, I returned to the first crime scene. (This was now seven hours into the job.) Suddenly I realized that the u-shaped thingy I had bought did not match the u-shaped thingy that I broke. (So much for their one size fits all claim!) This meant another trip to the hardware store. (I will gloss over this trip, and only mention that I listened to some Country-Western music to calm my rapidly deteriorating state of mind.)

Returning home, I again turned off the water, and dove into valves; putting the u-shaped thingy off until I could think of it without my eye beginning to twitch. The valves were replaced without to much trouble, only requiring a propane torch, a pair of pliers, about fifteen minutes of yelling, and three burnt fingers; but, considering how the rest of the project was going this seemed like the world was getting better. At least I could turn the water back on for good. (For those of you who fear the thought of my being in possession of a torch sending out a 500 degree flame while inside, please note that the house did not burn down.)

With a new sense of accomplishment surging through my veins, I went back to the u-shaped thingy; immediately all sense of exaltation drained from my arteries.
Apparently, the same diabolical mind that thought of the valve-hose partnership had enough spare time to alter how the u-shaped thingy attaches to the rest of the pipe, I needed one more part to make it work, and the hardware store was now closed. (I had been working for ten hours at this point.) Resisting the urge to curl up in a corner and start whimpering, I quickly moved on to putting the faucet in, without allowing my mind to dwell on this setback. (My again twitching eye lent credence to the wisdom of this idea.) This faucet assembled fairly fast, and each of the parts went together very nicely. Though interestingly enough, one of the handles had a piece of red tape attached to it, and the other did not. Strange, I thought, and peeled the tape off. (Bad idea!)  Once everything was all attached I breathed a sigh of relief, and turned on the valves; water began coming out of the faucet, into the cabinet below. This surprised me, seeing that the handles were in the "off" position. In a brief moment of quick thinking I turned the handles to the "on" position, and the water stopped. It seemed a logical thought that the designers had not planned this to happen, which prompted me to consult the directions. It seems that the funny looking piece of tape had been to distinguish left and right, and in my fifty/fifty chance of placing the handles correctly, I chosen the wrong one for left and right. This meant that the whole faucet had to be taken apart, again, and the handles switched. At the end of correcting the handles my sanity was only hanging on by the minutest of threads, and wanting to be able to use the sink TONIGHT I decided that something had to be done. (The "short" project was over eleven hours long by now.) The solution implimented was, in my humble opinion, sheer genius. Since there was a pipe coming down from the sink, just not a curve to take it to the wall, why not put something under the pipe... I wanted to keep the bucket like this, and not bother with fixing the u-shaped thingy. The boy's could empty the bucket once a day, almost like living in a bygone era. When I suggested this to mom she gave me a look that implied greater suffering would await me if this stroke of genius was permanent. A prophet is never respected in his hometown, nor a genius either. Tomorrow I will try to finish what I began.

Now you have seen why I do not feel that plumbing should be high on my potential future employment list. Proficiency in this area just does not seem to be what God intended when he was dolling out skills.

It is getting late, and I need to get to bed. I have ballet class tomorrow! (Now that is something a little more fun!)

G'night!

I had one of these experiences lately too. Yesterday, I was instructed by my dad to build a set of two deck chairs. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. What I thought was going to take fifteen to twenty minutes turned out to be a project that stretched out to four and a half hours long. Now to get on with my story: I, the dummy that I am, decided to build the chairs on our back deck, which is where they were eventually going to end up anyway and right next to our back deck is our pool. Big deal, right? Well, there was a very strong wind blowing that day...right towards the pool. As soon as I opened the box that held one of the chairs, everything blew out, including the instructions. I had to run after the instructions that nearly landed in the pool. I walked back to my worksite and began to assemble the chairs.

Something I should tell you is that we have had these disassembled chairs sitting in our garage for a few months, crushed by other boxes filled with Legos and Brio Trains and other such weighty items. So when I started to assemble the chair, I soon found that the metal had been bent by all of this weight. Great. So now I had to bend 1/8 inch metal tubes into place while trying to bolt them to another piece of such bent metal. Arrgh...

When I had finished assembling the back of the chair, I had to do the arms. I soon found out that this involved eight teeny, weeny screws. Wonderful. And one of the holes that one of these screws was supposed to go into was way to small. Even more wonderful.

So after spending about half an hour trying to get a screw into its proper spot (which I eventually did), I had to connect the back of the chair to the arms. To do this, I had reach way under the chair to screw a super long bolt into place, four times. Also, I think I failed to mention that the ground that I was working on was covered in that cement that has all those sharp (emphasis on that word) little pebbles in it. Ouch. So while those pebbles were digging into my knees, I bolted the chair together.

Then I had to put the leg support onto the chair. Now, this wasn't to hard, except that when I got the thing on, it pinched my finger and gave me a blister. Double ouch.

One chair down, one to go and we're at about two hours of working on these things so far. Everything went pretty smoothly with the second chair until I had to assemble the arms. The metal was so bent, it was almost impossible to get it together. Of course, right as I had set perfectly to where I could just bolt it together, my dad called me for lunch. So I had to leave the project and come back to it later.

When I did come back, I began to bolt the arms together when the wrench I was using snapped in half. Luckily for me, the geniuses (I use that word in its broadest extent) gave me three extra. It's like they knew that that was going to happen or something.

This time when I tried to bolt the chair to the arms, I actually found out how to do it (flip the thing upside down). I then put the leg support on and sat down in the chair. Aaaaah... after four and a half hours, I'm finally done.

It is at times like these that we must remember Who is in control of everything that has ever, is, and will ever happen.

Until we meet again,

HRTF