Home Repair with rudyblues

Life threw everything at me this morning, gentle reader(s). Including the kitchen sink.

Old rudyblues, your humble correspondent, woke up this morning at the usually appointed hour for a weekend (somewhere before the crack of noon) with big plans and high hopes. Well, plans anyway. Not really so big, just the usual weekend domestic stuff that I hope to get done every weekend, but usually don’t accomplish. You know the kind, right?

He padded downstairs in his stocking feet and tried to make some coffee. Stepped up to the kitchen sink to fill the water carafe for the coffee maker and stepped square into something cold and wet.

Now stepping into something cold and wet is not altogether unheard of here at Rancho Retardo. After all, my Cat Master Jenna occasionally leaves me little fur origami figures in little puddles of something that resembles weak broth.

Cat Master Jenna

But this was completely different. Hair balls make a wet spot on the bottom of one foot. It’s disconcerting, but you’ve got one foot left you can still dance to when you encounter one. This was both feet, and I swear it was knee deep!

So rather than jump quickly onto the dry foot, since there wasn’t one, I looked down at my feet and discovered that a body of water the size of Lake Erie had collected in the night. Oh joy. And me with no coffee.

I thought I would make some coffee before tackling the cleanup and repair work that had suddenly appeared in my schedule, so I put the carafe below the spout and turned on the water. That’s when I realized the nature and severity of my dilemma. Water ran harder under the sink than in the sink.

The sink has one of those lift-out spouts that doubles as a sprayer. It had developed a leak somewhere in the armored hose, so each time you turned the water on it sprayed water all over the inside of the cabinet below the sink. Woo hoo!

Now I can hear you saying right now “rudyblues, you moron, that had to be going on for a long time to collect a body of water the size of Lake Erie, how could you not have noticed.” Yeah, well, stuff happens, okay? I heard something funny, I just never made the connection.

So my first order of business was pumping down Lake Erie. Well, actually it was a couple of bath towels, but I’m working the body of water angle here. Once the kitchen floor was dry I tackled the cabinet.

I opened the door and saw that the usual array of soaps and cleaners and sprays were all suited up with little life preservers, bobbing about in the bottom of the cabinet. Well, maybe not bobbing. But they were wet. A saturated cardboard box of Brillo scouring pads makes a real mess, ya know?

Unloaded the cabinet, sopped up the water, shut off the water to the faucet and then assessed the damage. Not too bad, and since I had plans to replace the faucet eventually, a trip to the big box home improvement store was indicated. My diagnosis, my treatment.

Now if you’ve ever been to the big box home improvement store with rudyblues, you know that every trip means some repair or improvement is imminent. Well, imminent might be a stretch sometimes, but today it was imminent. And every repair or improvement requires a new tool. It’s how I roll.

But today I was on a Mission from God since I still hadn’t had my coffee. I know, I should have stopped at Starbucks, but I wasn’t thinking straight. Did you know that you can spend the equivalent of the GNP of some developing countries on kitchen faucets? Who buys those things? I actually left the big box home improvement store without a new tool. The manager asked if I was feeling okay. That’s how unusual this was.

So I’m back home, facing the sink, thinking okay let’s get the old faucet off. Replacing a faucet is something akin to playing Twister with drain pipes, water pipes, a double sink and a garbage disposal while lying on your back in a space that’s tight for hobbits, let alone normal, slightly overweight (hah!) middle-aged men. Needless to say, blue words were spoken. Too bad Cat Master Jenna doesn’t have opposable thumbs, I could have used her help.

Shiny!

So, some scraped knuckles, a few colorful phrases I didn’t know I could string together, enough ups and downs to crush my step total for the day, and I’m now into that period of satisfaction that comes after accomplishing something in two plus hours that professionals accomplish in mere minutes. Don’t touch it! It’s just for formal occasions.