Home Repairs and Writing

 

       Hello, gentle readers! Hope you are all well and staying safe!

I love my house. I really do (and it’s a good thing, too, because with the pandemic, the DH and I are spending more and more time at home). It’s the perfect size for us and our four-legged fur babies. We’ve been here for twenty-four years. But, it’s an older home (it’s actually my age) and back when they built it, we didn’t have some of the compliance rules we have now so when something breaks or isn’t working right or we try to do an update, we’re always in for a surprise. When we ripped up the carpet in the living room, we found lovely hardwood flooring…except it was only in one part of the living room…the extension that was added years later was just pieces of plywood fitted together. Plus, whoever laid the carpeting poured tar all over the hardwood to make sure the moisture barrier stayed in place. Really? Who does that?                   

Anyway, you may remember the saga of my old house and having most of my plumbing replaced last year. Well, the plumbing issues returned (in the places where it wasn’t replaced) and I realize, I should have had the entire house replumbed because we developed a leak…

In our younger days, my DH and I would fix these problems ourselves, but as with older homes, we’re not as young as we used to be and find we just can’t do it (heck, sometimes just rolling out of bed the wrong way makes us hurt for days! Can you imagine trying to twist ourselves into pretzels to reach a pipe? The leak was behind the kitchen sink!)

I am thankful that I have good plumbers. They come in (fully masked and with a ‘can do’ attitude), assess the issue, and fix it. No muss, no fuss. I’m also thankful I have a crawl space under the house which made the pipes easier for them to reach and replace.

As I sat here listening to the high-pitched whir of the drill (the pipe needed to be cut out entirely and replaced), it occurred to me that home repairs are a little like writing. You’re going along and everything is going smoothly until KABOOM—you develop a leak or write yourself into a corner. There are only two options at that point—you can try to write yourself out of that corner by patching it up as best you can or—and this is a big one—you go back to where you started writing yourself into that problem and delete those words. It may be only a few sentences or paragraphs or it could be pages and pages. Maybe even a whole chapter! In the end, you hope the fixes you put in place were the right ones.

Stay well! Stay safe! And remember to spread kindness wherever you go!

Marie