H2O, Big Buck-O

DISCLAIMER: None of the following photos are ours. They are not our home. They are not representative of plumbing done by anyone I know. :)


Water, the most powerful force on earth, destroying more dollars worth of property, every year than any other weather item, combined; I think. The man who can control water is a man that deserves honor and glory!

Plumbing is the one thing that Handyman HATES. He can do it. He just hates to. He is willing to read the how-to books. He has done plenty of plumbing. But it is the one thing that he would rather pay someone to do. Other than that, he is a little bit of a control freak--wanting to do everything just the way he wants to do it.

And that's okay. (My dad gets a little bummed, because he gets relegated to demolition most of the time.) And a one-man crew is a pretty slow crew. But, when things finally get done, they are done just right, and beautifully...usually.

We do not have a good history regarding plumbing. Our first house was a beautiful little bungalow near a smallish, private university. It was a lovely house that had had almost nothing re-done to it. Built in 1939, it retained beautiful hardwood floors, crystal doorknobs and period lighting pieces, which we found in boxes in the basement. We redid the kitchen completely, before we had children. It was an eye-opener for me. He still talks about the size of my eyes when he took a sledge hammer to the plaster and lathing.

After five years of living there, we took the plunge to make the attic space into living space. The attic eventually became a lovely master bedroom, an office and a large bathroom and hall/stairwell. The plumbing for the new bathroom needed to run down into the linen closet and down into the basement below. Not complicated. But still, something we were willing to pay someone to do.

A friend recommended a plumber who had done some work for him. This guy came over in a van that looked like he probably lived in it. I was afraid to be there alone with him, but apparently he knew what he was talking about, and he was affordable. Handyman hired him.

The first day on the job, in fact the first half-hour on the job, he hit the main water supply line in the linen closet with the running sawzall. Psssssssssssssssss.........."Can somebody turn off the water?!" we heard him yell.

We gave him the benefit of the doubt. Sawzalls can jump back. It happens. We shut off the water and work continued. He always needed money to go get supplies. I didn't presume that there would be an itemized bill at the end.

When he was all done, it was winter. We weren't heating the attic space yet. So he was told to stub out the lines and cap them off for later. We went away, I think it was for Thanksgiving. Opening the back door, when we arrived home after being away for three days, we heard, "pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss."

This is NOT the noise you want to hear when you have been out of your house, for THREE DAYS! Sure enough, water was spraying up out of the capped lines in the attic, and raining down through our linen closet, flooding our little hallway (hardwood floors) and then running down through the plumbing holes in the closet floor into the basement onto the carpet and padding we had put down there....for three days.

Of course, when Handyman called "the homeless plumber", as we had dubbed him; he didn't return our call, ever. I think Handyman did get through to him once, this was before caller id on your cel. And he said he'd come out, but he never did.

So with experience like that under our belts, you can be sure that we are never excited to hire plumbers.

As I may or may not have mentioned, when we tore out the kitchen, Handyman got a little ahead of himself and gutted our master bathroom--back in August--while I was at work...after he had assured me he "wouldn't be getting into that yet." (He has admitted that perhaps it could've waited a little longer.)

I have not recovered yet. So, not only do I not have a kitchen, I also have to go downstairs, down the cold hall and onto the despised octagonal tile floor to share a bathroom with my teenagers. (I would rather share a yurt with Sherpas, or even with their yaks, truly.) But I digress.

In order to complete the kitchen ceiling, we have to run the plumbing for the master bathroom, that will someday be reinstalled. So we needed a plumber. Fortunately, that other guy didn't leave us a business card. We did call an established plumber who we had used when we lived "in the city". He came and gave an estimate.

Then we called another firm that is heavily advertised in our area. They have fancy paint jobs on all their trucks. Honestly, this made me a little leery. Handyman is NOT showy. He won't even wear red because it stands out, so I was a little surprised he was having these guys in. They gave us a bid that was about $1000 less than our long-time-known guy. So we went with them...



...let it be said, let it be known, that plumbing services should not always be chosen based on price. (I thought we learned this before.)

To be continued...