Plumbing

A fine day to ruin with amateur plumbing. I hate the work; it baffles me most of the time and the little problems are such pains in the ass that there is never such a thing as a "good day" plumbing. I wanted to open up the house and I wanted to save money. If it is just the case that I hate to do it, I can get over the hurdle. It is spring, the danger of a hard freeze is past, although it goes into the twenties tonight. We will go down to the camp at the end of the week to clean up the winter's mess. Now the trip there will be compromised. The house looks forlorn, from the roof down, with its rotting shingles and bee's nest in the chimney cricket, a geyser of water in the crawl space beneath.

The plumbing went well enough, that is, until I turned the water on, the only moment of truth. And the truth hurt. After all of the care taken to put the place to bed last fall, there appears to be a bad leak under the house in an exterior crawl space. And the water did not go on at all on the north side of the house, I have no understanding why as yet. And as for that fat, law-unto-himself bastard plumber, I've had enough of him. In last fall's effort turning the water off, he exhibited the sort of inconsistant behavior that is why he will not remain our plumber. The kitchen faucet was taken apart to an absurd extreme, while the dishwasher connection was simply lost, cut off or taken away, again for no obvious reason, with the result that I could not reconnect the water hose at all. And the leak beneath the house exists because the bum forgot to open up one of the faucets, and the water burst the copper fittings, naturally, the break is in an almost impossible place to crawl.

In the future, I am going to open up and close the house down myself. I'll do a better job, and I'll be frustrated. I'll piss and moan, but it will happen on my own schedule without grovelling to have it done, without dealing with half-assed work, a half-assed attitude. A handful of plumbing projects need work before they break and leak; this plumber never attends to them until they break, ever in a hurry to be elsewhere. I guess he thinks it is better business, to charge us for emergency overtime and that sort of thing, but he is mistaken. He has no more business with me, so it backfired. It doesn't matter. My hands are cut an scratched a little bit. They are not as strong as they once were. They will be telling me I am a plumber for a week to come, no doubt.