Two nights ago I noticed we had a bad leak under the kitchen sink. Crap. I’m pretty busy these days so I told my wife we’d get a plumber in to fix it. Just for the record, I have successfully changed faucets myself in the past. Of course we had to pick out a replacement faucet which meant we needed to take off the old faucet to check the opening and make sure there were no scratches under the base plate (in case we found a faucet set without a base plate). Oh, that would require two visits from the plumber.
You need to understand that I’m a bit of a cheapskate. I sure as heck wasn’t going to pay a plumber to make multiple trips. So I took the leaky faucet off myself. Once you’ve done that much, you might as well finish the job. So I headed out to the hardware store (with a baby in tow, BTW) and bought a new faucet. On sale of course. Actually, I checked several web sites before heading out and found one for half price! Yeah, baby. Now we’re really saving money. I got the faucet installed and then crashed on the couch because my freaking back hurt from contorting my spine so much under the sink.
All told I put in about 3.5 hours but only spent $56!
One could argue that if I had spent that time building software, I’d have come out ahead. But, you know, sometimes it just feels good to do something yourself. And frankly I scored some brownie points with Mrs. Hatchard for a) taking the baby out of the house for a while and b) fixing something that doesn’t have a keyboard. All you geek dads out there know what I’m talking about.
FYI: This post is a preamble to my next post on customer service. Stay tuned.