So, today I fulfilled the weekly requirement to do something new, and I think I made up for last week as well.
First thing I did was restring my violin (!!) and then use my fancy new tuner to tune it! Yay! This is huge, cause I am a music dummy. Totally clueless when it comes to anything that has to do with instruments. So, this is kind of a big deal. Now I just gotta learn how to play it....
The other new thing that happened is not necessarily a good thing. So, it's been freezing here, we have had snow (enough to shut down my work for 2.2 days!), it's been cold. The snow has not really melted much...but anyway. I get home from work, start doing some laundry. I notice the water pressure seems way low....I shut off the washer, walk around....hear a strange noise coming from outside....so I go out there, and of course my outside water spigot has blown off the pipe and there is water all over the yard. I conclude that the pipes froze and burst. I panic, call a bunch of plumbers, some friends. Freak out. No one is home, no one is calling me back...I go back out in the yard, take a look around, and I realize that the thing isn't necessarily broken...just one of the coupling thingamajigs had frozen and split in two. Around this time one of the plumbers calls back, tells me it would be $85 just to come out to my house, plus whatever it will take to fix whatever is broken. I tell him I will call him back.
So, if you have been paying attention, I am very careful how I spend my money. I don't do it lightly, and if I think I can fix something/do something myself, I will. So, I take the pieces of pipe and head to Lowe's. Fast forward 45 minutes and $5.05 later, and the problem is fixed. Whew. It's still dripping a little, so I will have to go out tomorrow when the sun is out to tighten it down. Hopefully it will be okay.
I will say this about the plumbing fiasco...it's times like these that it would be nice to have another person around. Yeah, I like being all sorts of self-reliant and whatnot...but it would be nice to have someone around to laugh about all the shit that happens, and to hold the flashlight for ya...someone with arm muscles.
shoulda let it keep goin, coulda had en ice skatin partay in ya'lls backyard.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that is what I was trying to avoid. :)
ReplyDeleteIsn't homeownership a blast (sometimes literally)? One thing my home inspector told me was to make sure to drain any hoses and then shut the water off (inside the house) to any outside spigots before winter. I was glad for that piece of advice because it probably wouldn't have otherwise occurred to me. So yeah...if you haven't shut the water off to that spigot yet, I'd recommend it.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how to shut the water off to the outside. I wish I did, because it would have made fixing the above much easier. I guess there must be something under the house? I know where I can turn the water off to the house, but I have no clue about the spigots...
ReplyDeleteOh, that's right, you live in the South and have no basement. In the North, all the pipes and shut-off valves are easily accessible from the basement. You would probably need to crawl under the house to shut it off.
ReplyDeleteI am not a big fan of crawling under my house, though I have done it before. I usually find things I don't like under there, like leaks and dead animals and insects I can't identify.
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