Spent the afternoon recalling what I disliked about Michigan.

Not that this is nearly as cold as one of those Michigan plumbing repairs would have been in the second week of December. In fact when I was working on the sunny side of the house it was quite comfortably warm. But under the house was finger-numbing cold – just barely not cold enough to freeze the damned mud.

D&L wanted a run to town and I wanted some just-in-case hardware so I didn’t get started until noonish. Probably wouldn’t have started much before then anyway because things did warm into the low 50’s today. Finding and fixing the leak was simple enough, there really isn’t that much pipe under the Lair. I ended up replacing more than half of the run to the toilet, just because that was the simplest way to do it. But then came the scary part.

Yesterday the gate valve that shuts off all the cabin water seized up and I had to put a wrench on the handle nut to get it closed. That left me with the exciting question of whether I’d ever be able to open it again. And for about an hour it looked like the answer was no. I have a replacement valve – I have replacements for nearly everything – but I’d have to go up to the water tank and dig out the big shut-off valve, then dig a deep trench from the cabin shut-off all the way to the riser. I’d have to deal with a whole mountain’s worth of ice water draining into the trench in which I was trying to repair plumbing. I could do all that, but really didn’t want to.

So I got creative.

I took the handle off the valve and determined that an 11/16 socket would fit neatly into the handle’s inner hollow. If that socket had 3 lobes, it could let me connect a ratchet handle to the valve handle and give me leverage.

🙂 I haven’t fabricated a tool like that since I was a dealership wrench. A hacksaw wouldn’t touch the job but thanks to Big Brother I have a cordless recip saw – and I have found that it pays to keep quite a variety of blades for it. Making that thing took a while, but not nearly as long as it would have taken to replace the valve.

So then I could get the valve open. I’ll probably end up digging everything up and replacing it in summer just so I don’t have this particular problem again in winter, but that’s a summer job – much easier to contemplate.

I ran around looking for further leaks and found none – no surprise since I’d replaced a major percentage of the Lair’s underfloor piping. Went inside to check that everything was working well – and found that for some reason the toilet’s valve now wanted to run continuously.

WTF!?!? That toilet isn’t two years old. Why would it choose this moment to fail? I have some replacement toilet valves – I try to keep replacements for everything – but I won’t know till tomorrow if one of them fits. That really made me mad, it’s like Uncle Murphy pissed in my stew just to be a dick.

Anyway, I shut off the water to the toilet, then went out to replace the pipe insulation as best I could. Here’s something funny: I didn’t buy any pipe wrap this morning because last weekend Big Brother sent me a care package containing four pool noodles. I do use pool noodles for pipe insulation – they’re cheaper and thicker than normal pipe wraps – but didn’t think I needed any and Landlady mentioned a use she had for some. Giving them all to her seemed too much like hubris so we split them – and in a single week I regretted not keeping them all. I had enough to fix what I had torn out, but only just enough – not an inch too much.

I was also glad I didn’t get rid of my old cotton chore coat, because…

…it would have made me very unhappy to do this to my good work coat.

So now if you’ll excuse me, I have two days worth of dishes to wash and then I need a sink bath that involves actual water.