Some like it hot

I have a tale about home plumbing that weaves through several weeks of our lives and touches on humanity as well as home improvement. It will be long, so manage your fluid intake for the journey.

On August 21st, nearly a month ago, Shrop got in the shower while I was getting dressed in the bedroom. I heard a crash and presumed the shower caddy had come off the wall. I peeked into the bathroom and asked if everything was okay, and Shrop said, "Yes."

While I was starting breakfast, Shrop called down the stairs to ask for a pair of pliers. That was an odd request, but I've learned to get the pliers first and ask questions later. Upon delivering the tool to naked Shrop, I discovered that it wasn't the shower caddy that fell but Shrop himself that fell.

Shrop falling was unfathomable. Shrop never falls. And if he fell, he would catch himself or pop back up. Falling in the shower? No. I thought we had another 40 years before that was a possibility. But as Shrop says, even monkeys occasionally fall out of trees. Shrop was standing on one foot in the shower, washing the other with soap, when he lost his balance. Putting a soapy foot down onto shampoo remnants meant he went down hard.

While falling, Shrop ripped the shower handle off the wall, twisted the tub faucet, and bent the drain plug with his body when he landed. It was epic. Shrop used pliers to turn off the water and mentioned we would need to get someone to fix the shower. I scoffed and said I would fix it. He nodded and went on with his day, slightly bruised but confident in the capability of his life partner.

We are lucky to have a plumbing supply store in our neighborhood next to the local bar, sub shop, and 7-Eleven. A very knowledgeable and reasonable man also runs this plumbing store. I took the pieces that had ripped off the shower to him in a ziplock bag. He told me I needed a new cartridge, turned around behind him, and produced the exact part I needed for $24. Great. This should be easy.

Then I realized that the shower, like most showers, doesn't have a cut-off valve, so to replace the cartridge, I had to cut off the water at the street. Do you know how to cut the water off to your home at the street? Say if you were less lucky than we were and water sprayed all over your bathroom. Do you even have a water cut-off tool, bruh?

I was proud of myself that I owned two water cut-off tools. I think I brought one from our previous home and the other conveyed with the house. When I went to the closet where they lived, the newer one was nowhere to be found. How do you lose a water cut-off tool? No worries, I could use the one that came with the house.

The one that came with the house doesn't fit the valve at the street. The one I own is cast iron and resembles a medieval war hammer more than a plumbing tool. I can't find a picture of anything like it on the internet anywhere. The plumbing store owner doesn't know what it is. Dad doesn't know what it is. It's possible that back in 1947, when this house was built, the valves were a different size, but we'll never know. So I didn't actually own a water cut-off tool, let alone two. I just had a giant hunk of cast iron for home defense.

No problem. The plumbing store has water cut-off tools and they know where they are. I went back to see my plumber guy and picked that up. We were back in business.

I learned that while the internet says you only need to turn the valve a half turn (and I swear that's how it was at some other house I've lived in), you have to turn it 180 degrees at this house. Otherwise, you just create low water pressure. I sorted that out and installed the new $24 cartridge. It didn't look the same as the previous one (what was left of it), but it fit in the hole and water wasn't spraying at me, so I called it a win.

The only problem was that if you turned on the water to shower, the cartridge leaked. If you took a short shower, you might not notice the drips because they were inside the walls. But if Shrop took a "long shower" by his standards, it rained in the kitchen all morning. That was August 28th when I discovered that.

I went back to my plumbing guy. He didn't have another cartridge in stock and said it would be "next week" before he could get one. That's when I discovered that his shop only carried the OEM version and I could get the authentic Peerless brand from Amazon for $47. Sold. I didn't even return the other cartridge to my plumbing guy. He gave me $24 worth of help over the week.

Amazon said the new cartridge would arrive between 4 and 8 AM the following day. I was stunned that was even an option, but my phone buzzed at 4:16 AM, telling me my package was delivered. It took me a few days to get the time and energy to replace the cartridge. In the meantime, we had towels stuffed in the wall to absorb the slow leak.

On August 31st, I replaced the cartridge. No leaks. I felt like a winner. It had been ten days and I was ready to call this problem solved.

Except the shower was lukewarm. I knew an anti-scald device was in there, but it shouldn't have made it that tepid. After some noodling around online, I realized there was an adjustment "ring" you could turn to set the maximum temperature for the shower. Okay, I turned it around to as hot as possible, and my instant read thermometer only read 102 degrees. I don't know about you, but that's not cozy when it's spitting out of a shower. I knew that "new" shower valves had features to save us from burning ourselves. Shrop said we should disable the anti-scald device, but I warned him about others who have been burned in showers and wasn't comfortable doing that. But I was still pissed the shower wasn't hot enough for me. The other two showers with handles from the 80s worked great, but I couldn't have a hot shower in my own damn bathroom. In desperation, I turned up the water heater "a smidge."

And then I almost burned my hands at every sink in the house. This wasn't working.

I don't just like hot showers for the comfort of them. I need that high heat to loosen my muscles.

On Monday, I went to pick up Ian from school and brought the dogs with me. Cash failed to hop in the way back and tumbled all over the driveway. To keep him from running off in a panic, I grabbed him and put him in the car "real quick." When I did that, something in my left rhomboid turned into a rock, and my back was all messed up. Great. This wasn't my first rodeo with muscle tightness.

I got home and coached Shrop through using the cups on my back. That helped some. But that same Monday, I realized I had picked up a cold from someone at the office last week. So I was coughing with a tight muscle in my back. Tuesday morning, I woke up with my face itching from an allergic reaction to something completely unknown. My shower was only lukewarm.

I went to bed last night with Sudafed, Mucinex DM, Benadryl, and Tylenol on board to become unconscious. None of them worked. All night, I lay in bed coughing, scratching my face, and trying to find a way to lie in the bed and not hurt. At 4 AM, I gave up and decided to take a shower. It was the worst shower I've ever had in this home.

I was determined to figure out how to get past the anti-scald device without actually risking our safety and violating my homeowner insurance policy. But I was too sick to mess with the stupid tub, and it didn't seem prudent to start at 4 AM.

This evening, I was back in the game. I brought all my tools upstairs and was going to investigate the shower valve. Max temp was 106 F. If I took the temperature regulator ring off, it went all over the place, losing pressure and ending at zero water flow on the other side. That's weird. I returned to my official max temp and started backing off that position to see when it got cold.

People. It got hotter. According to the instant-read thermometer, the maximum temperature my shower could produce was 136 F. It may have been even hotter, but that was enough to tell me something was wrong.

And that's when I realized I had installed the new official name-brand Peerless shower cartridge upside down. I didn't even think that was possible without it leaking. I guess that's the quality of name-brand parts if you can use them wrong and still not spray water all over the bathroom. You might melt your skin off, though, trying to get cold water.

I went back out to my old friend, the water valve at the street. I flipped the cartridge around and am pleased to say it works as expected. I also turned the water heater back down to something much more reasonable.

It has taken me 30 days to fix the shower. And that's with help! I talked to my neighbor, the contractor. I talked to my dad. I talked to the plumbing store guy. I used YouTube. As my old boss Harry would say, "What do stupid people do?"

I could have hired someone to do it. I've hired plumbers for almost this exact job before when the previous cartridge went bad and I couldn't deal with it. But I now have a water cut-off tool that works and know exactly where it is. I can tell you the water temperatures of all the showers in our house. I got comfortable messing with the water heater. I did clever things like closing the tub drain and laying a towel down so I didn't lose critical tiny parts down the pipes. I am very clear how tightly I need to tighten every screw in the shower assembly. I've wandered all over home improvement websites comparing shower kits. And I fixed the shower all by myself.

You can't know everything. And to understand how tight is tight enough, you have to break a few bolts sometimes. Thankfully, all my mistakes were easily managed. And I have earned my hot shower tonight.

Also, water cut-off tools are only $20 and could save your house thousands of dollars in water damage if something goes wrong. Just sayin'.

Home again

There was a good chunk of time when I felt like an intruder in my own home. There were caregivers living in my house who were less than happy with me. My husband wasn't speaking to me. I felt pretty out of control of my situation. 

I wanted desperately to retreat from the house to anywhere else. I also had Ian to consider. It meant spending time at the house until Ian went to sleep and then running away until late that night or the next morning before dawn. It was toxic in the house, and not just because of all the bowel fluid. There was a dark cloud hanging over the property, as far as I was concerned. 

And then Rich died. And the caregivers left. And we got past the funeral and the drama of my scandalous actions the last two years. And the world continued to turn on its axis and birds built nests and flowers bloomed. 

I had my lawn mowed, trimmed, and edged by Lil Don and his uncle. They hacked away all the bamboo that had taken over the last 10 feet of my property. My azaleas are now lower than the front windows. 

I brought Lil Don and his uncle back last week to pressure wash the house and garage. My buildings are white again! I opened the pool and the water is actually clear. It's completely clean and running great. Children laugh and splash for hours while I nap in the hammock. I ordered a retractable awning for the back deck so I can chill out there without bursting into flames. 

I put new artwork up in the living room. I ordered three canvases to put up in my bedroom. I open the windows every morning to let sunlight into the whole house. I have called for bulk pick ups almost every week to take away moldy hockey gear, piles of junk from the garage, and the broken bits of the trampoline net. I threw away countless numbers of DVDs and books.

I sold a pavilion. I will soon get my other pavilion back home. (Many thanks to Rob for storing it for like 700 days.) I gave away three of the four camp beds. (Why did we have four camp beds?!) I hacked up the recliner in the back yard. I threw away lovely handmade gifts from hateful people. I did save all the sappy love letters from Beatrice, though, because they're an amazing and amusing testament to crazy.

I put all my motorcycle equipment in the cubbies that once held medical supplies. I have a ridiculous set of cat stairs for Kitterson to get into my bed and it delights me to see her use them every night before she curls up with me. I gave away the coffee machine and replaced it with a burr grinder and French press for my Death Wish coffee. The second fridge is full of organic veggies from my CSA instead of bags of TPN. 

I walk around my house in little to no clothes because there are no guests sleeping on my couch. I listen to music in the kitchen every day. 

I've made appointments with my witch doctor, my therapist, my hair dresser, my photographer, my endocrinologist, my massage therapist, and my trigger release therapist and they're all helping me get back to me. I had the opportunity to go out of town this weekend and chose to stay home simply because it's so nice here. 

I am home.

Hammock time

Call George!

Who's ready for a post that's not about cancer? So there I was, finishing Rich's dressing change (we can only get but so far away from cancer topics), when there was a panicked knocking at our front door. Our new neighbor Rachel was in her PJs yelling, "The dog's stuck in the fence and he bit me!"

I yell back to Rich (who is pantsless but with his wound covered at least) that I'll be right back and go running out the door. I thought their dog was a girl but she said "he" so I was confused.

When I come around the corner of her house, it was her next door neighbor's akita stuck in the chain link fence. She had tried to lift him but he was terrified so he'd nipped at her. Thankfully, it didn't break the skin, though she will have a huge "domestic abuse" bruise on her jaw that will be awesome to explain at work.

I ran back to our house to get towels and my phone. Rachel called animal control and I called my dad.

Whenever my parents' next door neighbor would have issues, they would call my dad for help. She was in her late 70s with young grandkids so there were always issues. It got to the point that when something went wrong (like when one of the kids locked herself in the bathroom), the youngest would yell, "Call George!"

I called the house number but no one answered. I called his cell phone but it rang and rang. That's strange because it's always on his belt and he always answers it. Eventually my mother answered it. I blurted out, "I need Daddy immediately!"

I heard my father on the other phone line say, "I gotta go." and they just hung up on me. Dad came racing down the street in his 1985 (actually, 1984 maybe?) Vanagon which is like a toolbox on wheels. I ran over to tell him it was the neighbor and not Rich that needed help. He went back to his van for nippers, jumped the fence and clipped it to free the dog. I threw my arms in the air and shouted, "Hooray Daddy!"

We got the dog fresh food and water and set him up in his laundry room out of the storm. Animal control came about 15 minutes later and assessed that he could walk fine. They'll leave a note for the owner and I left one as well. But he was smiling and wagging his tail when we left.

I thought working from home would be more relaxing.