The Exciting Weekend Adventures of.....

MeLissa the Builder (who is posting in first person because it just makes the story so much more amusing!). Sing along with me now, will you?

MeLissa the Builder!
Can we fix it?!
MeLissa the Builder!
Yes we can! (maybe).

Erhem, okay...it's out of my system for a little bit. I guess that's all you can hope for given how Tyler, my nephew, has trained me. :) But, I wonder, should I be calling myself MeLissa the Toolwoman? I'll let you be the judge...

This was my big exciting weekend accomplishment (or it would have been). Now it is probably going to be my exciting Monday accomplishment...maybe (unless I have to go get teflon tape which I am sure we actually have, but which I can not find for the life of me). You're all confused now...I know it's true. You have no idea what I'm talking about. That's because I think we forgot to tell you about my exciting teeth brushing story from sometime last week. I can't even remember what day it was. I was a little pre-occupied with how things were going to go when I resigned....

Anyhow, one day last week, I went to brush my teeth as I do every morning before I go to work. I picked up my toothbrush, went to wet it under the faucet and voila, the handle came off in my hand. Um, yeah....not a good thing. It appears that our bathroom is determined to make a plumber out of me yet. I resisted with the toilet, but the faucet is similar to the kitchen faucet I changed (with the help of 'the French guy' whom I was dating at the time) a few years ago. So, I figured this was going to be fairly easy...after all, I'm in California now and do not have to worry about a massive build up of calcium to make the faucet a real "witch" to get off, right? Wrong. It was still murder...and it's a good thing that Mark can feel his way around or I'd probably still be laying under the sink doing my best impersonation of Yosemite Sam (reckin' shrekin' no good....you get the idea).

Lucky me, though, my wonderful prince charming husband rescued me and got the lines loose because he's brilliant and decided to go for the nuts that connect into the water supply rather than the ones that connected to the faucet and were cemented on with plumber's putty (which I only know the name of because it was mentioned in the faucet assembly instructions and I'm putting two and two together). Anyhoo....

We got it out of there and then the real fun began because he unscrewed the top of the drain popper thingie (a technical plumbing term, I assure you) and, of course, it went down into the sink drain. Darn it all. So, I forgot about it for a bit, got the sink in place with some additional help from my dear hubby and then decided (because I'm stubborn and because two trips to Home Despot - so named because it is a tyranical ruler guilty of torturing countless wives and girlfirends throughout the country and maybe the world - in one weekend is just torture even if you do find an absolutely wonderful Plumeria plant to add to your wonderful deck arrangement!) to at least try to get the connecting lines apart from the old faucet. I gave up pretty quickly and tabled the sink repair until Sunday. Oh, but we did get the stupid piece out of the drain and I tried to hook up the thing that puts the stopper up and down (this is going to be a long post - perhaps longer than normal I just realized).

So, Sunday, we went back to Home Despot, visited the friendly and yet sort of creepy guy in the plumbing department that lauds me with compliments on my beauty and talks about how great he is (with my husband standing right there - hello!?! Poor vision or no, buddy, you cross the line and he'll kick your keester...) which, of course, prompts my dear Mark to joke for the rest of the weekend about how many goats I am worth as a persian princess and how many pickled goat's feet our kitty Pixie is not worth. He's quite a loon, but I love him (my husband, not the creepy Home Depot guy). Oh, and yeah, to finish my thought, we bought the lines necessary to hook everything up.

After a trip to the grocery store, I set myself back to fixin' things. It seems easy enough. Screw these two little thingies together and turn on the water and voila. But, no...it isn't that easy. It never is with me. First, I screwed everything on and then I turned on the water....and got wet. Oops. Oh, yeah, you think I should tighten those with a pair of pliers, eh? Yeah, well, that probably would be good, but I was kind of hoping that I could hand tighten them so we could actually get them off again if necessary. Never mind...tighten, tighten, tighten. Turn on. More leaks. Darn it. Tighten U-Joint which I also forgot to tighten with the pipe wrench. Goodness, I'm an idiot sometimes. Turn on the water again. Still a bit of dripping in the back - dry it with towel and see if it stops. Yes. Amazing. I think we have it folks! And, then....

The sound of clanging metal. Never a good sound...and in this case signifying that the blasted stopper puller upper and pusher downer (I think it's called a pop-up sink valve) had "fallen" apart. So, to be wise, I turned off the water, took that apart, did more tightening with the pliers and put everything back together...

Now as an aside, I actually wanted to also replace the pop-up valve part of the sink. The faucet assembly came with a replacement and it excited me because the prior owner of our house whom I frequently refer to as the "bird murderer" because he left a glue board under the stove without telling us and my parakeet, Woodstock, managed to escape from his cage, find it and die trying to get off of it (God rest his little soul), but I digress. The bird murder also replaced the original pop-up stopper thingie (again, a technical term that I use a lot when it comes to home repairs) with one that should have went in a tub. But, I didn't replace it because to do so would have required plumber's putty and much more plumbing knowledge than I ever care to possess. And, yes, I hear you - why not just replace the stopper part. I thought of that, too...unfortunately, it is too big. Kind of amusing if you think about it - a stopper for a tub fits, but one for a sink is too big. Aye Carumba.

Okay, so anyhow, I put everything back under the sink and went about my merry way. I made dinner (a terrifically tasty cold pasta salad with chicken) and cookies which taste terrific but definitely should be refrigerated as long as Martha tells you to...and no substituting time in the freezer isn't good enough, but I wanted cookies and I wanted them last night...not sometime this week. I will make a second attempt with the remaining dough this evening. Then I helped Mark study, almost finished the laundry (I can't wait until I can do this in between my daily work stuff) and then it was time for bed and teeth brushing. Now if you were paying attention here, you're saying, but....but...

If you're like me and weren't paying attention, you won't think anything of the fact that I grabbed my brush and excitedly went to turn on the water...until I say that nothing came out of the faucet...absolutely nothing. Oh, drat, I forgot to turn the water back on. This is either going to be no big deal or a real mess I thought to myself so I reached under the sink where all my stuff had been nicely stored again and slowly turned on the water only to immediately turn it right back off because something was leaking. Darn it all. I think maybe there's a little water that built up in the pipe. So, tonight I have to take everything out from under the sink and turn the water back on, hope that I don't have to go through a whole hullabaloo to get the leaking to stop yet again and then put all the crap back (or go to someplace and buy teflon tape since ours is lost). Then, I will finally get to brush my teeth using my sink again....

But, this is not the end of the story, my dear friends and family...nope. I get to do this a second time this coming weekend because since I hated the faucets anyhow, it seemed like a good and rational thing to replace them both. After all, they need to match right?...despite the bizarre layout of our home. Our bathroom has one sink in it. Then on the other side of the wall in the entry to our Master Bedroom, there is another sink. Who came up with this design? They're weird...that's all I'm saying, but it does prove useful regularly. Regardless, the pair must match so I get to do this all over again. I sure hope I learned a few things the first time around and that it won't be as much of a fiasco...but at least it provides good blogging fodder. ;)

Other exciting news - I think I have my first client! :) Our dear friend Penny is going to let me help plan husband Brent's birthday party. How exciting! More details on that to come, I'm sure. But for now, I'm going back into third person land so that our little blog reads more like a story. :) We hope you enjoyed the break!

And how was your weekend?