On Plumbing

I've yet to bring up the "Bathroom Project" on this blog and so it's about time.  My one true and pure Wendellian trait is I'm a do-it-yourself-or-die-trying type of worker.  This is often to Sara's chagrin.  I came by that genetically from my father both in mule-headed stubborness and a general competency in all things handy.  I like to think of myself as competent although plumbing tests that theory to its absolute limits.  In my basement is a bathroom in progress or what we like to call with a shudder and a hundred yard stare, "The Bathroom Project".  The project also includes the adjacent laundry room cause it was all one big pie hole when I started.  Actually I've enjoyed the project, though its been challenging and expensive.  I'm two years into it.  Let me recap in under a hundred words. 

Tear out old caveman bathroom.  Scrape mold from floor and walls.  Send garbage to growing hill on the horizon.  Frame laundry room.  Plum in actual laundry drain.  Issue colorful and creative epithets of profanity. Frighten wife and children.  Thank the plumbing God for No Hub Rubber Couplings.  Plug old, grody floor/laundry drain.  Design.  Redesign.  Have Architect friend tell me design is crap.  Use his design.  Make bathroom plan bigger.  Yeah!  Jackhammer up concrete floor.  Lay all new drain pipe.  Love PVC.  Hate Iron.  Learn number one rule in plumbing.  Shit Rolleth Down Hill.  Pour new concrete over new pipe.  Muttering prayers of penitence.  Frame.  Replumb upstairs bathroom drains.  Issue colorful and creative epithets of profanity.  Frighten wife and children.  Replumb all supply lines with pex pipe.  Love pex pipe.  Did it in a day.  Did I mention I love pex pipe.  Fix leaks on tub valve.  Raise too low tub spout when tub comes in.  Install 6 foot jacuzzi tub.  Listen to singing of angels.  Level, adjust, level, adjust, level, adjust.  Issue colorful and creative epithets of profanity.  Frighten wife and children.  Level, shim, adjust, level, shim, glue.  Frame.  Plumb tub drain.  Cut pipe with small blade in tight place by hand with short impotent strokes.  15 minutes of hell.  Fill tub with water.  Feel guilty.  Tub is a filthy, capitalist monstrosity.  A hundred gallons and 20 amps of pure hedonistic excess.  Shove guilt down and allow welling up of joy when the jets kick on.  Hear running water.  See water beneath tub.  Issue colorful and creative epithets of profanity.  Frighten wife and children.  This lasts for the next hour.  Go mad with sawsall to access leak.  Fix leak by contorting body and turning greasy pipe wrench with mouth.  Stress marriage even more by getting dust on wedding dress box.

I have to say it's fitting that that took 301 words to accomplish.  Everything about the "Project" is three times what I estimate.  Three times the cost, three times the time and three times the aggravation.

And then yesterday I spent a pleasant afternoon running my last run of drain for the bathroom and laundry room sinks with my oldest son, a little father son bonding.  "It's like a puzzle," I said.  "Like Sudoku," Zander said back.  He's obsessed with the number puzzle right now.  "Yeah like Sudoku."  He helped me hold the pieces and cut them and measure them.  I showed him how to properly use a tape measure even though it seems I'm often times inept at its use myself.  No mishaps this time.  We glued it up and then I looked at my plumbing book. 

In passing, to find information on the stub out for the wall, I noticed I'd broken my vent by forty-fiving the whole drain line up to the height I needed for the vanity.  I read.  I looked.  I mumbled.  I held my head in my hands.  I paced.  And then I admitted we'd have to redo it.  "It's just like Sudoku," Zander said with a shake of his head.  Yes it is son.  Yes it is. 

The plumbing is done.  If I never plumb again that would be fine with me but it's one of those things that always seems to rise again like hydra's bloody @$*#! head.  As long as I have to take a dump I'll have to turn a wrench.  I'd like to think though that I've learned something from all this.  Perhaps some humility, patience, tenacity, and maybe a touch of vocabulary.  When I'm soaking up to my chin in boiling-lava-hot bubbling water I'll think back and smile.  Its all worth it I suppose.  And as my three year old son Shepherd always says, "I did it myself."