Blogs

By Etta Sedit

1. Confirm that your house is less than one acre away from the nearest neighbor’s hose spicket in case you need it.*
2. Catch up on all dirty dishes and laundry, refill pet water bowls, flush toilets and make everyone shower. Actually, just go ahead and clean your house top to bottom. You will thank me for this later.
3. Check to make sure that no one at home is planning on coming down with the stomach flu. Or their period. Or the urge to urinate on the living room floor.
4. Check to make sure it is not a weekend when, should your repair project fail, you will have to pay a plumber’s emergency surcharge or perhaps go without water from 7 p.m. on Saturday until, at the minimum, 6 p.m. on Monday.
5. Consult YouTube for repair instructions.
6. Consult the Home Depot plumbing guy even though he seems to be not quite as old as the shower unit you are attempting to replace.
7. Realize that the YouTube video involves a brand-new bathroom.
8. Recall that your bathroom is 94 years old.
9. Realize that both YouTube and the plumbing guy suck.
10. For goodness’ sake, just go ahead and hire that underpriced handyman who cut your grass recently. He was so happy about the free eggs from your hens and $10 tip you gave him, as well as the hug since by golly were you happy to have SOMEONE ELSE cut your overgrown half-acre of grass, that he may take pity on you and not charge very much for the repair. Just hope that the complicated, retrofitting of both your copper and galvanized pipes to the new shower unit he is installing is within his realm of ability. Fingers crossed.

* According to spell check, the word spicket doesn’t exist and instead should be spigot. However, if you check with the Urban Dictionary, the use of spicket by persons living in the Mid-Atlantic is perfectly fine.

— Etta Sedit

Etta Sedit lives in Pennsylvania where she is currently working on replacing her kitchen sink sprayer hose.