Home Ownership 101

 Doomed. 

That's how I felt when my wife greeted me with the news that the toilet in the back bathroom was leaking. It was Saturday morning and I knew where my day was heading. 

At first, I went about my day with the notion that I might finish up my morning's chores and then find my way back there to take a look once the regularly scheduled business was taken care of. A few drips in addition to the drips that had already dripped weren't going to harm anything in the meantime. 

So I did a load of laundry. Went for a run. Took a shower. Had lunch. Then I went back to take a look at what needed to be done. 

A very long time ago, we tag-teamed on the installation of a bathroom at the back of our house where once there was a washing machine. It was an early attempt at lifestyle contouring, creating a second bathroom out of what had been half a laundry room. 

It was nice to have a second place to take care of one's business, especially because there were three of us competing for those moments of relative solitude. The family of seven that lived in this house before us must have had unique patience and control to have lived here with only the one commode. Even now, with the empty nest in which my wife and I find ourselves, there are numerous occasions when having options when it comes to toilets is more than a convenience. 

So I put my meager plumbing skills to the task and made a flurry of attempts to make things better. Instead they became wetter. This necessitated a trip with the wife to the hardware store to acquire what I discovered on YouTube: a basin wrench. While we were there, we picked up a couple of replacement hoses to make the toilet work and the hot water in the back sink which we had been avoiding fixing because who really needs hot water in the extra bathroom? 

The local Ace Hardware supplied us with that basin wrench. And two new supply hoses that we bought on the speculation that they looked like they might fit. They didn't. And the basin wrench proved to be less than helpful in getting the job that I had hoped to do. Instead it was only useful for making more of a mess that required us to call a plumber. A magical thing, that, since it was late Saturday afternoon when we made the call, and he was able to show up to help put our mess back together. Before sundown. 

When he left, he promised to be back on Sunday morning, ready to fix the broken things that started my Saturday. The water was turned off, so we weren't going to have to bail all night long. We were "roughing it," to use my wife's term. And I looked forward to feeling just a little less doomed.