James Proclaims!

Sometimes DIY can feel a little more like DI Why? I honestly don’t know why I put myself through it.

The general lack of a budget to pay a tradesperson may be part of it. The fact that tradespeople rarely return my calls even when I do have the budget is also a problem. I live in an area where demand for services far outstrips the level of services available. For any jobs that I think there’s an outside chance of me being successful, I often attempt the work myself rather than attempting to arrange for someone to make me wait in on multiple days only for them never to show up.

I’m not naturally a practical person. If you need someone to stoically stand in front of a room full of feral teenagers and not lose his cool, then I’m your man. If you need someone to write passive aggressive emails to uncooperative colleagues, then you could do worse than to employ my services. And if you want overdue paperwork that barely meets the threshold of adequate then I can certainly bring something to the table.

But words like ‘repair’, ‘install’ and ‘renovate’ are alien concepts to me. Nonetheless, out of necessity, since becoming a homeowner I’ve had to affect various repairs in Proclaims Towers in order to maintain the natural flow. Of water. Through taps. And on occasion through toilets.

I’m not a plumber and the carnage caused by by my early home plumbing efforts was very real and caused no small amount of emotional turmoil. But I have got better over time and if not exactly competent, I am able to make almost adequate repairs to plumbing problems when required. I don’t like doing it but when needs must I can step up.

A few weeks ago, for example, I discovered a leak under my kitchen sink. It was quite bad and the sort of thing that I couldn’t really ignore, even for a day. It needed either an expensive emergency plumber or for me to give up my sanity for an evening. I opted for the latter and made a surprisingly effective repair. Of course, paranoia required me to check under the sink for the next few days under the assumption that my efforts would result in a far worse situation than that which I’d fixed. But my repair held firm and several weeks on is still holding on, which means it’s probably fine. My experience of ineffective repairs (and I have plenty of experience) suggests that if a repair is going to fail, it’s going fail pretty quickly.

Today I attempted DIY of a less essential nature. Last year my outside tap started dripping. It was a rusty old tap and not amenable to repair. At the time it didn’t seem worth replacing so I turned off the water via the conveniently fitting isolation valve. But that was at the end of the summer when an outside tap seemed surplus to requirements. Now that summer has once again arrived (as has been the norm of late, I’m writing this a few weeks ago, when summer is more of an imminent possibility than a reality but on the day I’m writing this, the star of our solar system is definitely making use of purchases made from their milliner of choice) and an outside tap seems like a useful proposition indeed. As the father of two small children I can see the value of accessible water in the garden. There are pros and cons. A key pro is that children find water ridiculously entertaining. If my children are entertained then that sometimes means I get to relax for a few minutes in the garden, often with a cold beer. The obvious con is that my children end up soaking wet and often covered in mud. If I don’t also end up soaking wet in the process, then by the time I’ve been through the inevitable bath time routine I certainly will be. On balance, a few minutes of sitting drinking beer in the garden is appealing irrespective of the consequences. So today, I attempted to fix my dripping outside tap.

This first necessitated a trip to a local DIY store. Fortunately, my two-year-old was napping so I only had to take my five-year-old with me. And she was not badly behaved per se. But DIY stores are boring for small children. Unless you let them run around. Then they are ‘small child nirvana’. But it’s not especially safe to let small children run around in a DIY store, so I imposed limitations. Little Proclaims is quite a loquacious child and though she conformed to my rules, she felt it necessary to compensate for her lack of freedom by talking to me.

A lot.

I’m not overly confident when it comes to purchasing plumbing parts, and often my first trip to the store is far from being my last in trying to get the job done. The endless chatter of a five-year-old is not necessarily the most helpful aide in ensuring that the correct components make it into the basket. Nonetheless, I felt I did manage to check out with everything I needed, although I wasn’t 100% sure about the part which connected the new tap to the pipes.

Our next stop was the neighbouring toy store, a visit to which had been part of Little Proclaims ‘compensation package’ for giving up an afternoon in front of the TV and instead accompanying me to B&Q. We spent a good 30 minutes in the toy shop so that Little Proclaims could be sure that I knew exactly what to buy her for her birthday. I agreed to everything on the basis that she asks for so much she tends to forget most of what she’s asked for as soon as she’s asked for it. She never does badly on her birthday – I’m pretty good at present buying, but she does love to browse the aisles of the toy store and as we were in the neighbourhood I felt it only fair to indulge her toy-acquisition daydreams a little.

Once I’d pried her away, we returned home. Mini Proclaims had enough nap-time left for me to feel confident about effecting the renovation of the outside tap. It all went pretty well. I had to replace a lot of the copper pipe because what had been there before had seen better days, but I managed to do that part of the job without any problems or even a hint of flooding. I twisted the isolation valve and water flowed to the new tap.

Which then began to drip.

In much the same way as its predecessor had dripped.

The drip was not specifically coming from the tap itself so much as the tap connector. Which, to my credit, was the part I thought might be wrong. I may not have mastered plumbing but I’m getting so much better at predicting exactly where my efforts will fail.

Fortunately, I have been able to fall back on the isolation valve for the time being and so the new tap is sitting dormant.

Whether my children get to enjoy a summer of water-based garden fun is uncertain. I think it’s a fairly easy fix, but I may have used up all my motivation today.

At the time of writing, it’s the beginning of June and I’m about to return to work after a week off. By the time this is published I’ll be about to finish work for the summer and will have six weeks of holiday/childcare to look forward to. It’ll have taken some very temperate weekends between the two dates for me to have felt that fixing a largely useless tap was a good use of my Saturday afternoon.  But six weeks ahead of me in which entertaining my offspring is my sole raison d’être, a working tap (and its inevitable link to an uninterrupted cold beer in the garden) might well be motivation enough for round two.