Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Sorry I’m Late, ……..

…… but one tends to get lazy when one is retired and pretty much fuck off as much as one want. Hell, I even bought tons of extra underwear so I didn’t have to wash clothes that much. But since I'm even out of that, and all the bath towels are dirty, I guess I'd better do some laundry. What do you think?


Anyway, the weekend started early. Friday Lori took off at noon and we spent the rest of the day shopping. We stopped at Red Lobster about 1:30 for lunch and a Bahama Mama. Then on to the big mall to get a few things Lori knew she could get there. I bought a couple of things too. We found a fiber optics Christmas tree for my place at Walmarts. Last year I avoided all the holiday’s and didn’t even put up a tree, but not this year. Life goes on.

When we got home, I went into the large bathroom to take care of business and noticed water was trickling out of the wall under the facets by the tub. It wasn’t a bad leak, but any leak coming out of a wall is bad. I went down stairs to the basement to see if I could tell where the water was coming from. I had removed a part of the ceiling in the basement under the tub once before and never repaired it, so it was still open, which made things easier to inspect. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I noticed there was a small stream of water running across the floor. It hadn’t started to puddle yet, so I figured the leak must have just started. I looked around and saw water coming down through the opening in the ceiling.


I couldn’t tell exactly where the water was coming from, but the water was hot. I knew nobody was in the shower, so that meant either a pipe joint was leaking or a pipe had burst. I turned off the hot water supply valve on the water heater and in a couple of minutes the leak stopped. It was getting late and since the leak stopped, I decided to try and find out what the problem was the next day. That evening I made a plan of attack.

I used to work for a plumber and have repaired a few busted pipes as part of that job, so I was going to attempt the repair myself. The first thing I had to do was open the wall to see what was leaking. I wasn’t going to remove the tiles on the wall in the bathroom, so that meant I had to open the wall on the opposite side in the den. Simple enough to cut a hole in the wall, but getting to that wall was another story.

First I had to move the computer desk away from the wall. But to move the desk, I had to move a table. But to do all that, I had to clear them off. That was what was going to be the hard part. I had almost 30 years of memories and precious keepsakes mostly useless crap covering every conceivable surface in the den. The den and the basement were the places we accumulated all of the things we needed to save were to lazy to get rid of .

Barbara liked a tidy house was a “neat freak” and as you may have figured out by now, I’m not too concerned about such things a slob. Think of us being like the Odd Couple. Her being Felix Unger and me being Oscar Madison. To prevent arguing listening to her bitch and moan about the messes I made, we made an agreement. I could “decorate” the den anyway I wanted leave it a mess, as long as there was a path to walk through it to the kitchen and to get to the linen closet, AND I helped her keep the rest of the house neat and clean, I agreed.

Every Saturday I helped Barbara clean the house and I cleaned up after myself each night. Since I hated giving up most of my Saturdays cleaning the house, pretty soon we hired a cleaning lady. I still cleaned up after myself, and we she did light cleaning each day, but every two weeks the cleaning lady came and did all the big stuff.

I got work on the den Saturday and managed to fill three 48 gallon trash bags with memories and precious keepsakes mostly useless crap and managed to move the desk out of the way. I put the table in the basement along with A LOT more memories and precious keepsakes mostly useless crap. Now it was time to open the wall.

This story is long enough so I’m going to stop here and finish it in another post. Yea, I know the suspense of what is going to happen next is killing you, but I don't feel like typing anymore so your just going to have to wait.

MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

5 comments:

Monogram Queen said...

Well you don't seem to be in full-on-freak-out mode so i'm guessing it's not "too" bad!

GAB said...

If was really really bad I dont think we would have gotten this much even today.

lime said...

plumbing problems are such a pain in the butt.

jillie said...

You know Tony...when you buy ALL that extra underwear so you don't have to do as much laundry...that just gives you all that much more to wash. Did that make any sense? LMAO...leaks? OH MAN...we just remodeled our 3 bathrooms. Let me tell you about leaks! Glad to see you're back I've missed you! xo

Libby said...

hey tony-good job on getting some stuff out, anyway...problem is, you'll get all kinds of stuff for Christmas to replace it!!