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Introduction to Plumbing

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Plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task. Today I tried to repair the drain in my mom's front bathroom. The pop-up wouldn't go up and down. Based on this and all my previous plumbing experience, I have come up with John's Rule of Plumbing: All plumbing work takes three trips:

  • Trip 1: Get the parts.
  • Trip 2: Get the right parts.
  • Trip 3: Get the parts you forgot in trip 2.

Oh, and at the end of this I should add the optional trip 4 to replace the parts from trips 2 and 3 that are defective out of the package.

Have I mentioned that plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2008
    Agreed! But you forgot the other Trip 4: Optional Trip 4: Get the parts that you broke after trip 3.

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2008
    @Christopher Agreed. And of course there's also trip 5, where you go to another supplier to get the same part in the vain hope that it's the part that's having problems and not you. :-)

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2008
    I'm sure you feel like this follows you around ever since you posted about your Maytag Neptune problems way back when.  I just thought I'd bring up an old scar, maybe one more time.  I couldn't find your email address and I'm not an MSDN user, otherwise I'd have emailed you. We bought our Neptune washer/dryer combo in '97 and the washer finally quit about a month ago.  The repair man said that the timer apparently went out of it, but when he tried to replace it, the motherboard fried.  Buying a new motherboard in turn, also fried when trying to put it in with the new timer.  Third time's the charm, right?  Not in this case.  New timer, new board, board fries.   Never had a mold problem, though we often used straight ammonia to wash towels (keeps them feeling soft without all the buildup of fabric softeners -- and kills mold to boot!). Only have had one problem with the washer, and that was the locking mechanism.  To keep the washer going, my father somehow bypassed the locking signal on the motherboard and it worked for the last 7 years without spilling out all over the floor. I found your initial post very interesting, and I found it while looking for blogs about Neptune failures.  I'd never heard of the class action lawsuit against Maytag, but we'd never really needed it.   By the time you read this we'll probably have a new washer and that old man will finally be retired.   Thanks for posting it.