In today’s post I want to share a story with you from back in the days when I wasn’t very skilled in the ways of home improvement. I believe that you learn much more from failures than you do from successes, so I’m not in the least bit embarrassed to discuss this episode. I hope this story helps put your home improvement challenges in perspective. The only real failure is if you don’t learn anything from your mistakes.
In 2004, I was about six months into owning my first home. I had just learned how to wire a house and I was getting the hang of interior trim work. I was scrambling to get the place drywalled before a big work trip overseas. The day before my flight, my dad had come down to give me a hand with some other house work. Back then I hired out all my drywall work and I had a few guys hanging the sheetrock in another part of the house. It was a cold and rainy day, typical for that time of year in Philly.
Shortly before the sheetrock guys were to quit for the day, my dad and I noticed water had started to drip heavily from an archway just near one of the windows. My first reaction was to assume it was from the rain. The home was 100 years old and a bit of a money pit at the time, so of course that’s where my mind went. I opened up a window to see if I could identify where the rain was entering the house and instead noticed the rain had pretty much stopped, but the drip inside the house was getting worse.
At that moment, the drip started to appear more in the center of the archway and my father and I realized that one of the drywall screws probably punctured a copper pipe. Crap.
After turning off the water, we had the drywall folks rip down a small section of their work and we were able to quickly identify where the leak was located. Rather than call a plumber, we decided that we could easily handle this repair. All we had to do was cut through the puncture and solder on a coupling sleeve over the cut. We thought this would be simple.
Let me tell you something, 2014 John would have that leak fixed in about 15 minutes. 2004 John and his dad were in over their heads.
We headed over to the hardware store and picked up some propane, a pipe cutter, solder, flux, sandpaper, some flux brushes and a few couplings. We cut the pipe right on the puncture, sanded it, pulled one of the pipes out of the way to slide the sleeve on and then set out to heat the pipes. We had heard that you could use bread to keep the interior of the pipe dry while soldering and that seemed to work okay. Confident that we had totally nailed it, we turned the water pressure back on and promptly had multiple jets of water spraying into the room. Crap.
For the next two hours we essentially repeated that process four or five times. Once it got to about ten o’clock my dad had to leave and I called an emergency plumber. I couldn’t just leave the water off while I was away. I had two roommates at the time that in all likelihood would require use of the shower and toilet.
The emergency plumber showed up and fixed the leak in about the time it will take you to read this post. He was FAST. He also charged me $250. Oof. Here’s where I got my money’s worth though: I asked him what I was doing wrong and he taught me some tips that I’ve used countless times since. Instead of a $250 repair, it was a $250 one-on-one pipe repair training session. Money well spent.
Here’s what he did differently:
– He didn’t try to use one coupling over the punctured area, he cut out the entire section and soldered in a short section of pipe with two couplings. The punctured pipe had been too deformed to get a solid seal around it.
– He used MAPP gas instead of propane since it burns hotter and heats the pipe and coupling up faster.
– Immediately after the solder was sucked into the joint, he used his flux brush and brushed a light amount of flux on the outside of the joint, which appeared to further smooth and even out the solder. It looked much cleaner and more professional as a result.
These types of lessons aren’t limited to plumbing obviously and while I hope you find his tips helpful, that’s not the point of this post. Sometimes, we just need to step back when we get stuck and ask for help. It’s not a surrender or a defeat, although it sure can feel that way sometimes. It’s an opportunity to learn.
If you’ve had an expensive home improvement lesson, I’d love to hear about it. Please share your story by leaving a comment.
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