Plumbing

I hate plumbing. Can I say that? I hate plumbing. This necessary evil in most homes drives me nuts. Electrical I can handle, but plumbing drives me around the bend. It's not that I can't do it, I can, and I have done lots of it, but that doesn't endear me to it.

Electrical work is so clean. Nothing gets wet. Nothing leaks slowly. You don't have to join wires together every ten feet and around every corner. There's no such thing as elbows and tee-joints, unless you are running wires in a conduit, in which case you are back to plumbing. If something goes wrong, it just blows a breaker or refuses to work. It doesn't soak the insulation and warp the plywood. It doesn't result in large puddles of electricity on the floor. If something goes REALLY wrong, the resulting fire usually burns pretty clean.

Plumbing projects always last a lot longer than originally estimated. I usually have lots of spare parts on hand from prior projects, but none of them ever fit. The pipe glue for plastic pipe has always dried out by the time I need it. The fancy creation I have made out of pipe to get around an obstruction points the wrong way. All this results in extra trips to the hardware store for more supplies. If I have to dig a trench to lay a pipe outside, there will invariably be large stones just under the grass which stop the shovel with a bone-jarring clank. Just below the stone will be a main sprinkler line that I laid a few years ago that I have forgotten about. This main line is no match for the shovel and I end up shattering a section of the pipe. The sudden flow of water instantly soaks the ground and my clothing and I leave a wet trail through the house as I rush in to shut the well off.

The latest project was an outside water faucet that leaked. Badly. It should have been replaced several years ago, but, as you know by now, I hate plumbing. This year the handle started to strip. When you turned the handle, you were not usually opening the faucet, unless you pushed down at the same time.

Yesterday, it was time to fix it. I needed to spray some weeds and it was difficult to turn the water on to fill the sprayer.

I tried tightening the screw holding the handle on. It broke. Now the faucet has no handle. I dug through my spare parts. I actually found a new faucet that fit. Now the chore was getting the old faucet off.

A couple years ago, after another plumbing project which required me to borrow a pipe wrench, Deb bought me my own pipe wrench. A nice big one. Two feet long. It could double as a boat anchor. Armed with that wrench, I attempted to unscrew the entire faucet from the wall. It turned, but the entire pipe turned with it, making the old caulking around the pipe chip away in large chunks. I wormed my way into the crawl space to clamp the pipe down from the inside.

Back outside to give the faucet another go. This time I could feel the resistance of the clamped pipe. The faucet began to turn. Slowly at first, then all of a sudden easily. Looking at it closely, I could see the pipe was still turning with it.

Back into the crawl space to check on the status of the clamp. It hadn't moved. That could only mean one thing. The section of copper pipe hidden inside the wall had buckled and twisted from the force. Not a good situation. Now a half-hour project was turning into an entire day project. Rebuilding the pipe in those tight quarters was not going to be fun. And any more attempts to turn the faucet would most likely break the pipe.

It's here that my "whatever works" engineering philosophy kicked in. I didn't need a new faucet. I just needed a way to stop the water from flowing. I drove to Lowe's and bought a small shut-off valve with hose fittings, and screwed that onto the end of the faucet. The faucet may not close all the way and have no handle, but it doesn't matter anymore. The three bucks I spent on the in-line shut-off valve saved me an entire evening of work, and probably an equivalent amount in new fittings and pipe sections.

I may have delayed the inevitable, probably having to actually fix it if I ever sell the house, but I saved the time for now (an hour saved is an hour earned!). I actually got the weeds sprayed before it got dark.

The Fun Side of Plumbing ... Again

If you have been reading these posts for more than a year, you may recall one that I wrote last summer. Entitled "The Fun Side of Plumbing", it described one of my attempts to teach my boys life skills. The life skill at that time was plumbing. The laboratory was a slow-draining bathtub, and my two students got to see just how fun plumbing can be.

Since that time, we have had a couple other "plumbing labs", one of them being the same bathtub drain pipe which I finally replaced because of its continuing reluctance to make the bathtub water disappear. This time, the lesson was how the force of habit can interact with home repairs. I disassembled the drain plumbing and then drove to the hardware store for parts. In the mean time, Deb told Josh to take a shower as she always does about this time of day. Halfway through the shower, Deb needed to get something from the basement and discovered it was raining in the basement. Deb ran up and yelled through the door at Josh, who quickly stoppered the drain. This reduced the downpour in the basement to a mere drizzle. When I got home, they were moving all the boys' Lego pieces from the big wet spot in the carpet and had a large bucket catching most of the water. In this case, I didn't think of leaving some sort of reminder in the bathtub because I don't usually use it at that time. Josh wasn't helping me with the drain pipe so he didn't realize it was missing. Once things were dried out we had a good laugh.

We teach these things to our boys because we want them to be able to manage a household of their own someday. Including the plumbing. These life skills include the knowledge of what they can do themselves and when they need to pay for a professional. I sometimes wonder how much of these "life experience" lessons actually stick.

This past Saturday, I found out that these lessons actually do stick. Maybe not all of them, but this one stuck enough to avert a small disaster.

Deb and I went out to run some errands on a Saturday morning, leaving the boys at home. When we arrived home about an hour and a half later, David was waiting anxiously in the driveway.

"What took you so long?" he inquired. We thought it was a little strange that he would wait like this; he usually reads in his room when all his tasks are done.

We vaguely mentioned birthday shopping as his birthday is coming up in a couple weeks. But he seemed to be preoccupied with something else so we finally asked him what was up.

"Water," he said impatiently, "we almost had a flood".

When we came in, the boys were talking through each other in an effort to explain.

They heard a hissing noise in the kitchen, and after checking that the burners on the stove were indeed off, they located the source of the hissing under the sink. By this time the water was starting to run out over the kitchen floor, although most of it was pouring into the basement. A pipe had ruptured and was soaking everything under the sink. Josh tried to stem the tide by wrapping it with duct tape (I think he has seen me fix too many things with duct tape), but discovered that even duct tape has its limitations. It will not hold up to water pressure. Seeing that our sink does not have shut-off valves, Josh had the presence of mind to run downstairs and shut off the main water valve to the house. With Old Faithful now settled back down, they mopped up all the water and cleaned up the kitchen.

By the time we arrived home they had things pretty much back to normal.

I guess you could call this a sort-of "life skills pop quiz", and I am pleased to report that my boys passed this one. This kind of test may have been unexpected but it is far more real-world than a scheduled test in a classroom. Hopefully, when my boys are on their own, they will be better equipped to handle those fun little emergencies than I was. I'm pretty handy, but it was a rude awakening when, three days into the ownership of my first house, the toilet overflowed, and, with lots of gurgling noises, continued to run and run and run...

Me and plumbing, we go WAY back.

The Fun Side of Plumbing

Yesterday we had a night where we actually weren't going anywhere or doing anything. That meant it was time to take care of some things that were on the "urgent" list but somehow keep getting pushed back. One of those was the bathroom plumbing. The tub has been draining slower and slower over the last several weeks until a typical shower would leave water standing in the tub for the next half hour. It does wonders for bathtub rings. I have been able to delay this problem occasionally by a vigorous attack with the plunger, which would bring the drain-time to about five or ten minutes. Then it would gradually slow down again.

Time to teach the kids some life skills.

We located a pipe wrench at the neigbor's house, set up some chairs in the basement to stand on, and went to work.

I had David hold a bucket under the pipe while I removed the hangars from the ceiling and let the pipe down from the tub drain. I told him to keep the bucket under the open end of the pipe while I rotated the vertical section to unscrew it from the large pipe at the wall. As the section of pipe tilted downward, the predictable stream of water poured from the end. Only David had the bucket aimed wrong. Most of the water made it in the bucket, but some of it splashed over his hands and onto the basement floor. With the water came some of the stuff that caused the problem. Thick black tar-like goo that the water carried out in little globs. It didn't smell like roses, either.

David let out a shriek, dropped the bucket, which I managed to catch with my free hand before it hit the floor, and clamped his fingers over his nose. "PEWW!" he yelled. "This is awful!" He then swiftly wiped his other hand all over his clothing.

I held the pipe AND the bucket and let him gather his wits about him. He came back in the room with his shirt pulled up over his nose, making gagging noises as he peered over his shirt collar. Since the pipe came apart in the wrong spot, I had to take another section out. This one required considerable force on the pipe wrench, and the free end of the pipe wiggled around substantially, putting all that black gunk everywhere but in the bucket.

I told the kids we were going to take the sections outside and run the garden hose through them to force the gook out. Josh ran out to the barn to get a hose while I carried the pipes up the stairs.

I was just in the garage when Grandma drove up. She had a stack of books in her arms from the library. Lego books. Josh has a library card, but he has Grandma's library card number memorized. So whenever he gets on the computer to reserve books at the library, he reserves the books using Grandma's library card number.

I'm sure the librarians think we have an interesting Grandma. She checks out a lot of books on Legos, robotics, and birds.

Josh came back from the barn, lugging a garden hose. He saw what Grandma was carrying. The next thing I knew, the garden hose was laying midway through the door in the garage, and Josh had disappeared. I guess drain plumbing and life skills still don't hold a candle to Lego robots. I completed the job by myself.

Maybe next time I'll have Grandma come over with a stack of books on Math problems, or spelling words. Or tell the kids we're going to design a robot to remove black gook from the drain pipes. Or just tell them to grimace and bear it.


P.S. Deb says any bathroom SHE uses in this house doesn't have black gook in the drains.

Tales from the Front Pew, Chapter 9

Josh has a Palm PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). When he was in school, he used it to keep track of test dates, assignments due, etc. It was one attempt to keep him from forgetting everything. Now that he his home schooled, it is used less often. Mostly for playing games on long car trips.

His good friend, Jonathan, from school got a Palm for Christmas. Josh was there for a sleepover recently and the two of them traded Palm programs, beaming them back and forth like some sort of Star Wars communicators. Jonathan found a Bible program. The complete NIV Bible for the Palm. Josh now has it on his Palm. He likes to use it when we're reading Bible verses during family devotions.

A family that sits near us in church has a son, Troy, who is a year older than Josh. Troy saved up his money and bought a Palm PDA. He learned that Josh had a Bible program on his Palm. We sat ahead of Troy in church tonight. Both boys brought their Palms because Troy wanted the Bible program.

So, during the prelude, there the two are, Josh facing the back, both of them holding their Palms aimed at each other over the pew, while the Torah transferred invisibly from one to the other. During the offertory, it was the Kings, Psalms and the minor prophets. The New Testament had to wait until after the service, when Josh, Troy and David huddled over one of the tables in the back to do their beamings. I think they would have beamed stuff back and forth while we were walking out, but they couldn't keep things steady enough.

Normally, we would discourage this sort of thing, but, since it was the Bible that was being transferred, we let it go.

Tales from the front pew, Chapter 8

David is a free spirit. One of the things that he was excited about with home-schooling was that he would have some say over what he studied. I think he had the idea that he would be able to do whatever he wanted without any bounds. He has this idea in his head that he wants to do experiments. He has Deb's old chemistry set and he wants very badly to start mixing things together to see if they will blow up. I think we have a future pyrotechnics expert on our hands. Or perhaps just a pyromaniac.

Some of these experiments he does are constructive and I think he learns from them. He has been studying magnetism. There is a bowl of water on his desk in his bedroom. It has some wire wrapped around the rim, several magnets arranged around the rim, one magnet in the bottom, and a nail, slowly rusting away in the water. He discovered that if he stirred the water with the nail, he could get a small reading from a meter connected to the wire and the water. I'm still trying to explain what is actually making the meter move, but he already has visions of large bowls of water used to generate electricity.

Some of those experiments do not go so well. He wanted to experiment this morning before church. He had his new clothes on that Grandma had bought for him just the other day. He went downstairs. He was going to make a drill. He somehow connected an old ink pen to a motor and started the thing turning by connecting it to a battery. Unfortunately, the ink pen still had ink in it. Lots of ink. It is now all over his new clothes. He came upstairs rather sheepishly. "Uhh, Mom," he said. "We have a problem."

All the homeschool books encourage letting your kids discover by experiencing and experimenting. What they don't tell you is how much it will cost.

In church this evening, the pastor started a series of sermons on marriage. David wanted to lie down because it didn't apply to him. I told him to sit up. "You'll probably get married someday, " I told him. "Besides, if you sit up and act like you're listening, everyone behind us will think that we have such good kids." (I think they already know better.)

As the service started David asked me, "Dad, if you're a bachelor, do you have to go to these?"

I guess when you're 9 years old, marriage seems like it's a million years away.

Tales from the Front Pew, Chapter 7

Tonight's sermon topic was the Fruit of the Spirit, taken from Galatians 5:22-23. We were not in our usual spot, the fourth row from the front. Instead, we were in the fifth row from the front to make room for the Gems (the girls group), who led part of the worship service. There was a basket of fruit on the stage, and Pastor Doug introduced his message by holding up an apple and asking, "Who wants some fruit?" Many hands from the less inhibited among us (the children) shot in the air, and our two cherubs were practically leaping out of their seats in an effort to get their hands higher than the others.

He lobbed the apple into the audience, taking careful aim at someone who was actually paying attention. An orange was lofted next, and a couple other fruits. With an apple in hand, Pastor Doug caught David's eye and gently underhanded the apple into the air.

Understand that I do play catch with my son, and he does catch pretty well. Only this time, he didn't. The apple missed his outstretched hands and with the distinctive apple-sounding thud, struck David in the forehead and bounced onto the floor. David yelped, probably more in surprise than in pain, and the audience roared. David is good at eliciting that kind of response. After making sure David was OK, Pastor Doug continued his pitching practice. His last apple was thrown to Josh who still had his hand in the air. Only this time he came a few paces down the aisle before lofting the apple. Josh caught it and was now satisfied that he also had an apple. To have one child get an apple thrown to him in church and not the other can be a cause for war. Pastor Doug is a wise man. He has three boys of his own.

Tales from the Front Pew, Chapter 6

We had a choir in our church last Sunday. A big choir complete with robes. It's been a while since we have had a choir with robes, as the reactions of our kids indicated. When we were coming in, Joshua was looking around at all the choir members milling around. "Dad," he said with a questioning voice, "Why are all these people walking around dressed like prophets?"

David was doing some wondering of his own. Less than 30 seconds after Josh posed his question, I got a poke in the side from David. "Dad," he asked, "why are all these angel-ladies walking around here?"

We've been watching the Olympics the last few nights, right now there are skiers flinging themselves fifty feet into the air doing tumbles and twists and actually landing on their feet. Incredible. David has it in his head that he wants to do the luge. There is a luge run in Muskegon. He wants to try it out. Maybe this is the start of another Olympic legend. Then Deb and I can be the ones on those commercials saying we were the only ones who believed in him. We'll make millions.

The kids have a couple days off from school next week. We decided to take them to Chicago to the Field Museum. After some debate, we gave them a choice. Stay overnight at a hotel and spend some time in the pool or take the entire trip in a single day with a twenty dollar credit towards legos or some other thing of their choice. The decision didn't take long. They went for the twenty bucks. So we'll do the trip in a day.

Tales from the front pew, Chapter 5

Part of the sermon this morning was a video clip from "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Our normally-fidgety David was suddenly riveted to the screens, watching Linus recite Luke 2. There was an audible groan from David when the clip ended. He immediatley leaned over to me and said (loudly), "Can we rent that video, please?"

When we collected the kids to go home, I noticed that Deb had the video in her hand. Seems that David had approached the pastor immediately after the service and asked him if he could borrow the video. They watched it this afternoon.

Tales from the Front Pew, Chapter 4

It's been seven years now since we sat in the hospital for ten days with David when he was sick with spinal meningitis. As I recall, Thansgiving that year wasn't real thankful. But we have gotten many reminders over the years of how thankful we should be. The latest of those came, appropriately enough, on Thanksgiving day.

Deb and the boys were sitting in our usual spot, fourth row from the front in church; I was running the sound board in the back. From my vantage in the back, I could see that there was a good sized crowd here today. After the initial set of singing, Pastor Paul got up. "Happy Easter," he proclaimed. There was a tittering in the audience. "Happy Thanksgiving!" he corrected. After some more introduction, Pastor Doug got up. "You know," he began, "Pastor Paul was right. In a way, we do celebrate Easter today."

At this point a voice rang out clearly from the front of church. "It's Thanksgiving!" yelled David. The entire congregation roared. "Well," said Pastor Doug after a pause. "I guess that about says it all."

Seven years ago at this time, we were not sure what our son would be able to hear, if anything. This was a reminder that he not only hears, but understands what is going on. It just would be nice if those reminders came in other ways. My eight-year-old arguing with the senior pastor in the front of a packed church would not be my first choice.


We just had conferences for the kids at their school. One of the things that came up was that David's grammar was not as good as it could be. We were not surprised. After all, why put a period at the end of a sentence, or capitalize words at all? It doesn't change the meaning of a sentence, and it's just extra work. David doesn't like extra work. He knows the stuff, however. His teacher told us that he is the first to correct her grammar in class. One of the ways that Mrs. VanVugt tried to interest David in doing some better work was to let him do some of his grammar work on the computer. Correcting sentences like: peggy ate three candy bars She and the student teacher were talking over this with Deb last week when the student teacher began to giggle. She was looking over David's work on the computer and came across the above sentence. David corrected the grammar and then typed "what a pig" after it.

David was handed a paper in science class the other day. He asked the teacher, "Is this a test?"

"Yes," said Mrs. VanVugt.

"Well," responded David, "I better concentrate harder on this one then." David only concentrates on what's important. All the other stuff like everyday assignments and penmanship are not important. If it were his choice, he wouldn't do them at all.


I played tour guide the other day. Joshua asked me a while back if his ACT class could take a tour of Gentex as part of their studies on companies and think tanks. I agreed to this and set up a tour for the 20th. Three days before the tour, a company-wide email was circulated from the head of facilities saying that children were not allowed in the manufacturing areas. And I was planning on taking 18 fifth graders through the manufacturing areas. I did manage to clear it with one of the VP's and the tour went on as planned. My co-worker, Hal, and I split the group in half and each took a group around the plant. We had to stroll around the plant ourselves the day before because we don't often go to this particular building. So it was an education for us also.

Most kids would be fascinated by all the stuff they saw, but this group of naturally technically curious kids were oogle-eyed. A group of four of them spent several minutes analyzing a circuit board routing machine, trying to figure out how it worked. One of the workers in the circuit board assembly area gave a few of the kids some of the parts that were being put on the boards, parts only a little bigger than a grain of sand. It was rather funny watching them try to pass it around, especially when one of them dropped one on the carpeted floor of the conference room a little while later. We had lots of questions, but a few enterprising souls were repeatedly asking, "What do you do with the failed mirrors?" I finally reached into my box and pulled out one of my demo pieces, a piece of mirror glass with a circuit board attached to it. "Tell you what," I said. "I'll give this to Mrs. Gabriels [the teacher], and you can have it in your classroom to look at."

Mrs. Gabriels emailed me the next day saying a couple of her students were showing their friends from school the mirror that they have in their classroom. It must have made an impression.

Tales from the Front Pew, Chapter 3: High Fives

Our church met in the Family Life Center (that's CRC slang for gymnasium) for the evening service. As usual, the Friends were seated near the front. Because we like the kids to be involved in the family giving, we often hand them the bills and have them place them in the collection plate as it goes by. A small gesture, but it does teach the importance of regular giving. David took the bills and inspected them and then held them high in the air at arm's length and studied them some more against the overhead lights.

"David, what are you doing?!!" hissed Deb, yanking his arms back down into his lap. She had to say this rather loudly because he doesn't hear a whisper too well, especially in the presence of background noise.

"I was checking if these bills were counterfeit," David shot back. The tittering and snickers behind us told us that many other people were witness to this scene and probably knew exactly what we put in the collection plate that night. Even the minister was laughing. He was seated right in front of us while the offering was being taken. Deb told him emphatically that we do not put conterfeit money in the collection plate.

Meanwhile, Joshua had smuggled half of an ink-pen into church in his pocket. He was playing with it and demonstrated his new creation to his mother during the service. He had taken the ink line out and inserted it backwards into the barrel of the pen. By blowing on or sucking on the barrel, he could make the ink line extend out of the pen and retract back into the pen. Deb told him to put it away. "But, Mom," he told her. "It's hydraulics!" How could he put something so important away? Deb told him that church was probably not the appropriate place for science experiments.

When we got home, I gently set Josh straight on his terminology. He was actually demonstrating pneumatics in the front of church, not hydraulics. Pneumatics is the use of air pressure to perform a task. Hydraulics uses a liquid (such as oil). "Cool!" said Josh. Maybe for the next offertory, we can demonstrate true hydraulics, now that his terminology is straight.