June Showers

Even though I don't own the condo I'm living in, I take a weird sort of pride in the place. It's a combination of it's age and quirkiness, I think, along with the fact that I'm renting it directly form a landlord, rather than from an apartment complex.

So when I find that the floors tend to slant even more than I realized, I don't get annoyed and call maintenance, I find it adds character to the place and take my own precautions. And when I turn around and run into the wall in the bathroom, I don't get mad at the incompetent placement of the toilet, I chuckle at how charming and unique the layout is. Faced with faulty wiring, I would probably praise the rustic nature of my new home, but luckily it hasn't come to that yet.

For now all my annoyances are minor and are far outweighed by knowing that when you walk in the door to my house, your first thought isn't "What low-rent hell have I gotten myself into now?"

The fact that the thought is probably "Why am I sliding downhill in the living room?" is irrelevant to me.

In the spirit of appreciating what you have, I try my best to take care of things on my own and not get the landlord involved in minor inconveniences. Whereas two months ago I felt justified calling my apartment complex with righteous indignation because the florescent light in my kitchen had burned out after only 3 years of constant use, I am far more likely to tackle gigantic home improvement projects by myself now. Despite knowing absolutely nothing about even the basics of, say, circuit breakers, or how one goes about 'grounding' a live wire, I still like to go it alone. Usually, though, I'm far more concerned with other pressing issues, like whether it's an "Allen" wrench or an "Alan" wrench, and exactly who this Allen/Alan guy was in the first place. But in any case, it's become almost a matter of principle that I don't go for help.

When minor annoyance #23, the shower head is shorter than I am and sprays practically no water, finally became to much to bear, I went out and found a replacement fixture and decided that I would install it myself that same afternoon.

Extracting the old shower head proved to be a very simple process of unscrewing a single bolt, and I felt pretty good about my chances of completing the project without physically injuring myself or flooding anything. However, when I attempted to attach the new head, the connecting pipe proved to be 2 inches too long for the existing fixture mounted to the wall. I was a bit stymied at first, but ultimately decided that all I needed to do was use a hacksaw to saw off the excess pipe from the new piece and everything would work out fine. Necessity being the mother of invention and other similar trite platitudes, et cetera, et cetera.

Sadly, I do not own a hacksaw. Or a saw for that matter. I systematically went through the house and found that the only sharp edge I owned was a set of steak knives that I had bought over 3 years ago. These were a set of 5 plastic-handled knives that I had picked up on clearance at Walmart, chosen primarily because they came with their own wooden block for storage, and at the time I hadn't had anywhere else to keep utensils. Also, the fact that the whole set cost $3.99 was appealing to my broke self at the time. These knives were not serrated and I doubted they held a sharp edge at all. Knowing that I had never cut myself with them despite my innate clumsiness, it seemed almost impossible that these guys held any stronger cutting power than a butter knife or pair of safety scissors.

I still tried using them, though, as I hated to throw in the towel on my first real home improvement project so quickly. I worked for a full half-hour at the plastic pipe, sawing back and forth with varying degrees of fervor, often pretending that I was playing a particularly cheap violin, before finally declaring it a lost cause. 30 minutes of work had left a cut that barely qualified for the term. "Depression" might have been a more accurate word, in more than one sense.

Thinking that there may be other, less brute-force/round-peg-square-hole sort of solutions to my problem, I went to the nearby home improvement mega-store and explained my problem to a sales clerk there. He returned in short order with a smug look and a 37 cent pipe extender that would take care of the whole issue without use of a single tool. Never mind my initial request to be pointed in the direction of the hacksaw department.

Suitably chastised, I went home and applied his solution in under 2 minutes. The extender fit easily to the pipe, and similarly to the shower head. When I turned the water on a steady stream of water came out, at the proper height and pressure. I was vindicated by my domination of sheer will over plumbing, but was sad that it took professional guidance towards a piece of equipment that cost less than a pack of gum to achieve it.

The next day, I woke up and took my first shower with proper water pressure in a month, still slightly stinging over my not-quite-moral victory. I appreciated the strength of the water and the fact that I didn't need to bend at the waist to rinse my hair, but that wasted half-hour flailing at a plastic tube with the dullest knife in the world still irked me. As petty as it was, I really wished someone else hadn't been the one to solve the problem for me so easily.

As it was, I probably should have been a bit more specific in my wish. As I finished the final rinse of my hair, the pipe extender, so graciously provided to me by the smirking clerk, snapped in half. Causing the new shower head to come smacking down into the back of my head, and sending a wild spray of water that soaked the entire bathroom before I could recover from the blow long enough to get the water turned off.

It's a hollow victory, to be sure. Actually, thinking about it, it's not so much a victory at all but a complete and utter defeat. Still, I feel...better. So someday when I do get the shower to work (we are back to the old, wildly inferior shower head until I come up with a working solution) it will be all my own doing, and I can proudly proclaim my handiness and plumbing mastery for all the world to see.