I miss the hardware store desperately. Since becoming a home owner, I have constantly made early Saturday/Sunday journeys to the mega warehouse style hardware store to collect bits and pieces to repair/enhance our abode and more importantly get myself some sausages.
If something went wrong or broke, I’d be out the door quicker than you could say ‘two dollar sausages’ to browse the aisles and trundle home with a fist full of adhesives, paints, screws, hooks and doo dads. I have installed floating shelves, hung a swing in our undercover area for Little Fearse and built new wardrobes with the flat pack furniture expertise of Mama Fearse.
BNN began and the Saturday morning sausage journeys ceased.
It wasn’t such a big deal as I had amassed quite the stockpile of useful home repair supplies and believed that I would be able to tackle anything that the ol’ Fearse Cave could throw at me.
Then I broke the toilet.
In trying to attach a hose attachment to help clean Little Fearse’s nappy waste directly into the toilet, I tightened an attaching hose a little too tightly which caused the input valve to leak and leak and leak and leak. I drained the toilet and after initial spousal fury, Mama Fearse took to YouTube and gave herself a crash course in toilet repair.
On a side note, what did we do before YouTube? It would have to be one of the single most amazing “How To” resources available in this modern digital world.
After Mama had watched these videos we had come to conclusion that we would most likely have to replace the broken part in the toilet with a new valve and that it would potentially be the first time that we would need to buy something new.
This really disappointed us both greatly, all our hard work was about to go down the toilet (more puns to come).
I walked away from the problem and wore my thinking cap half-cocked on my head over night and mentally ran through the inventory of sealants, tapes and miscellanea. I awoke the next morning flush with determination to fix the toilet.
So I wiped myself off and got to work, I had used some sealant initially to try and stop the flow of incessantly dripping water and had found that it had considerably stopped the leak. I applied a little araldite around the seal and reconnected the hose; once again I over tightened the pipe and heard the same clunky click that initially “broke” the input valve/seal in the first place. I slowly turned the tap from a trickle to gush and the cistern filled. No more leak. No money down. No new purchase.
High fives were had and instead of dread, I was flushed with relief. We have once again avoided buying something new; resourcefulness and persistence have once again triumphed.
A day earlier, when I broke the toilet, in frustration I declared that we will just call a plumber and be done with it. Mama Fearse immediately poo-pooed the idea and rightfully so, It would have cost us a small fortune and even though it would technically fall under a “service” it would be considerably cheaper to purchase new parts ourselves and used YouTube to teach us how to install those parts successfully.
I’m glad that I went back to it a day later and gave it another crack. I think this illuminated the benefits of the BNN lifestyle that we have chosen to live, it is teaching me to be more persistent and more resourceful and more importantly making me be more thoughtful and measured in my actions around the house and in society in general.
Thanks for reading about our toilet, we appreciate it.
Cheers
Big Poppa Fearse
The Fearse Family 