HGTV Has Taught Me Nothing

My phone is on vibrant when I’m at work. The consequence of this is when I get a call on my cell phone—usually from K—my coworkers know as soon as I appear to be talking to myself in my office, they should perk up their ears if they want to hear something humorous. Yesterday was no exception.

K only calls me with crazy concerns. There was the superhuman spider—who wouldn’t die as K threw shoes at it from across the living room. Then there was the time he was certain a bird had pooped on Super-Sophie’s head, and wanted me to come home to clean it off. Yesterday’s conversation (as heard by my co-workers) went a little something like this:

What do you mean it cracked? What kind of cracking sound?

Tell me what you mean by leaking? Is it dribbling or spraying?

Is it just in the shower, or all over the bathroom?

Could you fill a cup in less than a minute? In fifteen minutes? In an hour?

‘I don’t know’ really doesn’t help me.

Do you actually hear water in the walls, or water moving through the pipes?

As I quickly packed my laptop, one of my co-workers came in and said, “So, going home to staunch the flood?”

Yep. That’s exactly what I was doing. The water faucet in the shower had cracked when K turned it, and after he failed to make it stop in the first THIRTY minutes, he thought his mother might have better luck.

As I was driving the three miles home, I was trying to call J—who is more inclined to make a difference in any kind of home repair situation, but I knew that getting in touch with him was likely not to happen, since he had a crazy day planned at work. After several failed attempts, I figured if I could keep things under control until he got home in a couple of hours, it would be a good save.

I don’t fancy myself any kind of handyman, but I’ve watched HGTV, people! I’ve seen the home repair shows on PBS. I figured I could, at least, keep everything under control until J got home.

Once at home I spent the first two minutes studying the downstairs immediately surrounding the boys’ shower. Holmes on Homes has shown me what water damage looks like. I didn’t see any. There was, however, water in the boys’ bathroom. K had decided that showering was more important than our plumbing emergency, and had just moved his operation to my shower. I started throwing towels down.

Where were you when I needed you???

I studied the situation through dribbles from the faucet and a fine spray from the handle. The water leakage wasn’t torrential by any means, but by now it’d been going for about an hour, and the bathroom was wet. I was fairly certain he’d broken the handle, and not the actual shower components or the pipes, so that was good, but depending on what part of the shower handle he had broken, it could require us to rip out the wall to replace.

I needed to figure out what part was broken. I also needed to be able to stop the water flow. The outermost part of the handle needed to come off, and I needed two screwdrivers and a wrench-like thing. Don’t ask me what it’s called. This is where I summarize another thirty minutes of searching in the world’s messiest (and most tool-laden) garage—it’s J’s world, after all—and tell you that finding tools that I really can’t describe in a tool chest system of J’s that I cannot understand, was…. Interesting. Finally I was equipped with an undersized Phillips, a flathead, and some pliers. That’s was as good as it was going to get.

Back in the bathroom, I was trying to decide what piece of the faucet/handle needed to come off first to begin the disassembly process. Figuring the very front/top piece would be a logical place to start, I attempted to pry it off. It wouldn’t budge. A dozen years of soap or water or something had that thing STUCK. K, who was back now to provide me emotional support, suggested that we just rip the whole thing off. I had no idea what to do next, but the one thing I knew in my heart was ripping anything off of anything else did NOT sound like a good idea. I attempted to remove some other pieces (with more success) but was unable to loosen or budge the front piece which was barring me from actually removing anything else.

It was certain now, though, that the water was not leaking in the walls (I could see about two inches around the shower handle unit in the wall). But I couldn’t get the handle to budge, in order to get to the metal piece that regulated water flow, and therefore couldn’t get it to shut off.  Plan B was shutting water off to the house. I remember how J had to do this at the old house to fix the kitchen plumbing, and that main water shutoff had been in the basement and nicely labeled. We don’t have a basement in this house and nothing is labeled.

In other words, where the hell should I start?

I checked the garage, the storage area attached to the back of the house, and even the attic. The only thing left was the utility closet with the water heater and furnace. I checked in there, and had an idea what was return pipes and gas lines, but couldn’t really identify a water shut off. There was no spicket-looking thing like there had been in our old house. The only thing I had left was an unlabeled black lever—buried in the wall of the utility closet, behind the furnace and the water heater—basically out of my reach, unless I wanted to climb over the furnace. K was following me, and since he is much skinnier than I am, I charged him with climbing in the utility closet to turn the unidentified lever, and threw him some gloves (thank goodness I could find those in J’s tools) to keep the fiberglass insulation from embedding in his skin. He made it to the back of the closet, and attempted to turn the lever.

It wouldn’t budge. We tried some more, and got it to move about twenty degrees. That was it. It wasn’t going to work. We tried to move it back to the open position, and it wouldn’t budge that way, either. Then K and I decided to take out some aggression and beat on it until it moved. Finally, after another 30 minutes, we got the damn thing moved back to where it started.

Now I had thirty more minutes until J got home, for the love of God. THIS is when he returned my call. I laid out the story for him, and he told me two things: 1) the main water shutoff for the house was likely buried somewhere in the yard (“slab construction means you usually had to shut the water off at the street level, Sarah”) and I should just wait until he got home.

Where was Holmes or Bob Villa when I needed them? And why the hell would anyone bury the main water shut off for the house in the yard???

So, I moved to water control in the bathroom. I had most everything cleaned up and controlled by the time J came home. And do you want to know what he did as soon as he got there and shed his work clothes? He went into the bathroom, assessed that the top/front of the shower handle wouldn’t pop off, and ripped the thing off the wall.

I shit you not.

He then grabbed the pliers, and shut off the water. He then picked up the small piece of plastic that had fallen off the handle when he wrenched it off, and said, “That’s your cracked piece. I’ll run by the hardware store, and pick up a new one.”

J spent twenty dollars and ten minutes fixing something that had plagued me for two hours. I decided that all I was doing for the rest of the evening (because it was well into evening now) drinking a beer and watching cable movies.

All of this to say two things—watching DIY projects has done nothing for me. Don’t fool yourself. When confronted with a minor water emergency, these shows won’t help you. I think this realization is even worse than the confirmation that the House Hunters show is staged.

My second point—lots of these things have been happening to us as of late. After all, it’s June (and we all know what that means for me). So, I’m taking a little mental break from blogging (and life, in general) next week. Don’t worry—I have guest posters lined up for the coming week—thanks to my lovely fellow writers at Sprocket Ink-- so you won’t be left unattended.

I’ll be relaxing and avoiding any type of fixing of anything during that time. Also? I won’t be watching HGTV. 

Oh, HHI, I don't know how to quit you.