If you cannot be a good example, then be a horrible warning…

- Catherine Aird

This week’s Girl Talk Thursday is about home improvement projects. We have way too many to even start listing. WAAAAAY too many. I could talk for days about my Wonderful Plans for My House (which include laminate all the way through because I hate carpet, and a new air conditioner, and getting rid of the popcorn ceilings, and…you get the idea).

Anyways, we’ve lived here for 4 years and the most we’ve managed to do is get some paint put on the walls (and that was 2 years after we moved in). And the reason for this is that Darren and I? are just not cut out for home improvement projects. We can do things like hang pictures and install latches on cabinets and things like that, but the major stuff? We are a Horrible Warning against home improvement.

Let me tell you about my shower.

We’d gotten back from a vacation really late and I hopped in the shower to wash the airplane and general travel grime off before bed. After I finished, we crawled, exhausted into bed. All of a sudden, Darren leaps out of bed and goes running downstairs, turns on a light, then goes running down the next set of stairs. He comes up, puts something on the laminate floor, and then comes running upstairs into the bathroom. He turns on the shower, turns it off and goes running downstairs again.

“What the fuck?” I thought, and I’m pretty sure that’s what I said to him when he came back because I was TIRED.

“The shower is leaking into the powder room,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, we can’t do anything about it now because it’s 2am [ed. note: or something], so let’s just GO TO SLEEP ALREADY.”

The next day, Darren figured that it was the grout that was leaking and the shower needed to be regrouted.

You can see where this is going, right?

We hired a friend of ours with a background in construction to remove the old grout and put new grout in.

[time passes...]

[more time passes...]

[even more time passes...]

About 6 months later*, the shower is ready: regrouted, sealed and ready to go. So we turned it on for a test run. And it leaked into the powder room.

:headdesk:

“Hey,” I said, in a moment of complete and utter brilliance. “Maybe it’s the drain. We should check that.”

So Darren pulls off the drain cover and checks it and something just doesn’t feel quite right. So we truck off to Rona to get a new drain. I toddle off to look at blinds while Darren finds a smurf.

A short while later, he finds me and he has a small tube of something that is supposed to fix our drain. I look at it, and the first thought that runs through my head is “Really? That’s it?”

Not only was that it, but that tube? Cost about $7 and we used about 3.5 cents worth of it. That and 24 hours? And my shower works.

So, let me serve as a Horrible Warning and tell you: get someone who knows what they’re doing with your home improvement projects. You’ll thank me later because you won’t lose the use of your shower for 6 months.

*We have a second full bath. I didn’t not shower for 6 months. Don’t worry.