Why do home improvement projects never stay small and simple?

[fenchurch]

Yesterday we made another run down to Tukwila, this time early enough to hit Ikea before they closed, and managed to pick up some new bookcases and a chair for our cat, Zoë. Yes, yes... I know! But it'll also be useful when we have guests down by our computers and it gives her a chair to sit on that's at easy arm height next to rackham's desk chair, and should keep her from trying to perch on the back of his chair (she's way too big to do it comfortably and ends up sliding off onto his back). Oh! And we discovered that Ikea also has a hanging shelf system (it's designed for garages but will work perfectly for what we need) and it's much cheaper and more configurable than the Elfa system we were looking at on Tuesday. Yay! And then we went out to dinner at Zoopa again... this time with 100% fewer crazy people (at least that we noticed).

So, today I cleared the bookcase we had against the wall we want to put the hanging shelf system on. The idea was to move it out of the room and patch the wall tonight, then maybe paint tomorrow so we could pick up the shelving system and install it this weekend. *insert hysterical laughter here*

The basement was finished off by the original owners sometime in the 1980s. These are people who firmly believed that if you're going to do something, you may as well do it half-assed (that really is the only word I can think of to describe it). It's like they would have an idea in mind of what they wanted things to look like, but they didn't bother finding out how it was actually supposed to be done and just sort of jury-rigged it to kinda look like what they wanted. The results have led to things like cheap phone line (inside the wall!) badly spliced together with electrician's tape (I should try to find the picture of the splice job from before we fixed it) or the drain pipe from the kitchen sink poking through a rough hole in the ceiling over in the corner and running diagonally into another rough hole in the wall.

So, we were looking at this pipe and thinking how much we've always hated having it just open and exposed and started contemplating the idea of building a soffit in the corner to completely cover the pipe. Rackham figured he could put it together tonight, do the mudding and patching tomorrow so we could paint this weekend and look at hanging the shelving system next week. No big deal and it would get that eyesore taken care of once and for all. In the meantime, we started eyeing the sliding glass doors in that wall and wondering if we should replace the trim around it... and oh! New curtains! And maybe we could paint the wall a fun color! Still not a whole lot extra, but it was starting to add up.

Rackham got to work cutting out the sheetrock around the pipe while I was upstairs loading the dishwasher... I checked with him to make sure it wouldn't cause him problems to have water running through the pipe and he replied "It better not!"

You can probably see where this is going, can't you?

Yep. We have a leak. A very small leak, which is why we hadn't noticed it... but a leak nonetheless. Well, that brought everything to a screeching halt. After consulting some online plumbing sites, Rackham came to the conclusion that this was the sort of thing we really need to have an actual plumber come in and fix... thankfully we had a recommendation for a local company from some friends recently. Rackham called and we'll have a plumber out here tomorrow sometime between 9:00 and 11:00. Yay?

On one hand, I'm rather glad we decided to take on this "simple" project now... because it looks like the leak is a fairly recent thing and it could have done some serious damage if it had gone unchecked, and there's no way we would have known about it until the damage had already happened. But on the other... this should have been a quick, easy, straightforward and relatively inexpensive project! Gah! After the Amazing Ever-Expanding Laundry Room Sink Replacement Project, I was really looking forward to something that couldn't grow. *sigh*

Comments

[kehf.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, the "don't it yourselfers" we know them well at our house. After 12 years here we have made significant in-roads on fixing their terrible work. We named our house "Pandora House" after the third or four project we started that turned into a Pandora's box of problems once it was underway.