Repairs

Have you noticed that, very often, when you think you have a simple repair job, it just seems to grow? Our cold water tap in the bathtub was leaking. It's an older home, so I figured that we could just take off the tap and replace a washer, just like we did in the"old days". My Aunt informed me that the pipes went back into the kitchen and we needed a special long wrench that we didn't have.We'd wait until we could afford to call the plumber. By that time, the leak wasn't a drip, but a stream.I shudder to think how much water was going down the drain everyday!

When the plumber came out, he said he liked to change out both taps at once. The hot water tap came out fine, but the cold one wouldn't budge. Since the back of the pipes are under one of the bottom cabinets in the kitchen, it would be very hard to get to them. We decided to let him go through the front, removing some of the tile to get to it. The cold water valve was stripped out and needed to be replaced. Considering the house was built around 1945, and these are the original taps, they've held up very well. Since the cost of a one handeled faucet set is compareable in price to the original 2 handles one, we decided to go with the single handle. We still have some of the original tile downstairs, we planned on replacing it ourselves. We even decided to go ahead with having a shower plumbed in, rather than keeping our useless handheld one.

As you can probably imagine, costs are climbing! Once the water valve and shower pipe were in, we realised we might not be up to repairing the holes in the wall ourselves, even though the plumber told us what to do, and I had seen my Father do it, we really lack the experience and tools, Now we have someone else coming in on Saturday to do the sheetrock work to close both of the holes. We are still going to do the tilework. We've both done that before. Unfortunatly, we don't have enough of the old tile. We're hoping there's enough to tile around the tap. MaryLou forgot she used some of the tile on her old kitchen cabinets. We'll look for a match, but the tile was originally bought in the 60's, so we may have to get creative with what we put around the shower and around the window. Oh well, it will be wonderful to have a working shower.

Another thing that seems to happen frequently. Having to almost clean out my savings account after I've finally got it built up, and so close to Christmas too. I guess I need to turn it around and be grateful that I have money in savings to help, right?