Noting another house repair chore victory

Yesterday I reported about how much I despise home repair, how I feel I'm really bad at it, how it sometimes goes terribly wrong for me, and how my work diary had demonstrated that a seeming failure was catually a glorious success.

I included this picture of our (formerly!) leaky laundry tub, and it reminded me of something else.

When we first moved into the house, more than four years ago now, that black outflow hose was unsecured. If you weren't careful — and sometimes even if you were — it would thrash around while the washer was emptying, and sometimes spray water everywhere.

In the first week or two after we moved in, there was a long list of minor problems like that. I found some store online that was selling a fix for the thrashing hose. The fix, which you can see in the picture, is a stiff but flexible rod with a collar at each end. You affix the collars around the top and bottom ends of the hose, then bend the flexible rod to force the hose to point in the direction you want. Then the hose can't thrash.

I observed a while back that the worst projects are also the ones that are easiest to remember. These are the ones that drag on for months, requiring endless adjustments, different approaches, and a lot of thought and toil. Or they're the ones that fail completely leaving some unfinished damage that reminds me every day that what I did didn't work.

Here's an example in the other direction. I didn't know how to solve this problem, but I found a solution, I executed it, and because the solution has worked flawlessly for more than four years I completely forgot about it until today when I was looking at this photo.

The work diary can help with this sort of thing. If I had a rollup page for laundry room issues I would be able to open it and see a list of all the things I had gotten right over the years, instead of forgetting them and only remembering the stuff that went wrong.

Claude advised that it would be better to write “hub” instead of “tub”, but I opted not to take its advice.

Addendum

Another example that occurs to me: in our house it's my job to unclog toilets. How many times over the years has a toilet clogged and I unfussily unclogged it with the plunger? Too many to count. And there have been other occasions when the plunger didn't work, so I would shrug, and go downstairs to get the toilet auger. I don't remember these many episodes because to me they were no big deal.

I should try to remember that no matter how incompetent I feel in general, just owning a toilet auger puts me way ahead of a lot of other people.