I saw a meme on Facebook the other day:
Plumber Rates
$150/hour
$175/hour if you watch
$200/hour if you help
$250/hour if you started the job first
The other obvious problem is I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m pretty good at faking it. As a new homeowner in the nineties, I gamely swapped out our 1940’s electrical outlets for the new-fangled grounded ones that became common in the sixties. On the other hand, I also bought a blowtorch and solder to repair the fifteen feet of exposed copper pipe below my deck that didn’t make it through winter. After a weekend of failed attempts, I passed the torch to my father-in-law and never tried again. But in general, if something breaks, I give it a shot before calling for help.
This one seemed so easy. The showerhead leaked intermittently. The dripping at night kept Susan awake. My hearing started fading fifteen years ago. A dripping shower doesn’t bother me at night. Without my hearing aids, I can barely hear my alarm in the morning. But the noise drove Susan nuts, and the showerhead was layered with corrosive gunk. We should have replaced it in the early twenty-teens. On a quick trip to Lowe’s, we bought a nice nickel-plated replacement for $119.99.
People like me who do home repairs without any training or know-how become accustomed to that “oh crap” feeling when we suddenly realize we’re in over our heads. For my shower fixture replacement, this was when I snapped my angle grinder wheel into pieces when I had cut only halfway through the handle.
Somewhere right now, I suspect a plumber is reading this and thinking “What the…?” If you’re an old school DIY person like me, and you flip through your dog-eared 1990s copy of the Home Depot Book of Home Repairs, the shower fixture section makes no mention of an angle grinder. My solution was the equivalent of a doctor taking a machete into eye surgery. Step one to replacing a shower fixture is to remove the handle. This is done with an allen wrench. Unfortunately, the little hole with the allen wrench bolt was filled with twenty years of soap scum, shaved leg hairs, mold, and a billion decayed skin cells. The gray-brown muck was impenetrable.
After digging at it with a safety pin for twenty minutes, I could sense the general hex-shape of the bolt-head at the end of the pin. I tried the allen wrench. I could get it to settle into the head, but it slipped when I tried to twist the wrench. More poking and digging with the pin, same result. Forty minutes later, the bolt was stripped. I tried to drill out the bolt, I broke the drill bit. I tried again and broke another bit. That’s when I grabbed my angle grinder. If I couldn’t remove the bolt, well, I would just grind it down to dust.
It took me five hours across two weekends (a Sunday and then the following Saturday) to get the handle off. That’s when I learned that the original plumber made some, er, unorthodox plumbing decisions. It took Donnie three more hours to complete the job. If I convert his three professional hours into Jeff hours, I would still be working on this in March.
Donnie was a good sport. He called me into the room from time to time to point out the code violations and other weird plumbing techniques he’d never seen before. He even gave me tips on how to make this repair by myself in the future. Despite my starting the job and then being somewhat present during his repair, he told me he would charge me the standard rate. I’m not sure whether this weighed into his decision, but I mentioned to him that I’m the guy who writes the check when his company does plumbing work for the library… something that happens almost every month.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
