Mucking with Clients

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day Six

Wednesday, September 24, 1986

I don’t want to sound like a snob, but some houses are so poorly built that I hate working in them.  They depress me.

Michael has such a house.  It has no foundation.  The roof is rotten.  The ceilings buckle; the floor tilts.  And the plumbing is a nightmare.

Unfortunately, I am Michael's plumber.  He’s a friend and a business associate.  I can’t refuse.

His kitchen sink won’t drain.

I crawl under the house.  The drainpipe from the sink has no slope.  Dead level.  Opening a no-hub coupling, black sewage spurts onto my pants.  The blockage is five feet long.  I scrape it out:  black, soggy, matted food waste.

The fix would be to rebuild the drain lines with a better slope — any slope, in fact, would be an improvement.  But Michael doesn’t want to do it.  “Too big a project,” he says.

So in another six months, I’ll be snaking this line again.

I replace the ballcock in his toilet.  When I rejoin the water line, the supply tube breaks and sprays water.  I replace it, leaving a damp carpet behind.

I remove his kitchen faucet and install a brand new Delta.  I love  Deltas.  They operate nicely, and they’re easy to repair and reasonably priced. 

My final assignment for Michael today is to test a built-in dishwasher that has been in this kitchen ever since he bought the place five years ago.  He finally wants to find out if it works.

First problem:  the water line is clogged.  I unscrew the angle stop and scrape an inch of debris out of the supply pipe.

Second problem:  the control knob is sheared off.  I turn it with pliers.

Third problem:  the dishwasher starts; the water goes in, but it goes right back out again through the drain hose without ever entering the wash area.  This one, I can’t solve.  He needs an appliance repairman, and I tell him so.

I started at nine o'clock.  I’m quitting at 3:30.  I leave a bill for 5 hours labor, plus parts.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe to head off an argument.  People never believe plumbing could take as long as it does, and I get tired of justifying myself.  Most plumbers can tell you: it's not the mucking in sewage that's so unpleasant, it's the mucking with clients.

Back home I shower, wash my hair, shave, cut my toenails — trying to remove all traces of sewage sludge from my body.  It seems to penetrate skin the way oil penetrates wood.  My clothes I drop in the washer.

At last I’m ready to begin my own bathroom.

The first step is always the most frightening: cut a hole in the floor.  Once cut, there’s no turning back.

As luck would have it, I have to cut through a floor joist.  Now the floor is dangerously weak — directly under where I want to place a 300 pound bathtub to be filled with 400 pounds of water and 150 pounds of flesh. 

Normally, you’d solve this problem by cross-bracing with a perpendicular joist, but in this case I can’t reach one of the sides where I’d have to hammer nails unless I tear out the ceiling of a closet downstairs. 

Study.  Measure.  Trade-offs.  Think.  Finally I come up with a plan involving mini-braces and a sheet of 1 1/8 inch plywood under the tub.

I don’t have 1 1/8 inch plywood on hand.  I cut and install the mini braces, and I repair some gaps where flooring was never laid for some reason.  Then I call it a day.  Four hours work. 

My wife comes home, and all she sees is a hole in the floor.  “That’s a day’s work?”

"Four hours.  I was at Michael’s until three-thirty.”

"Four hours?  One hole in the floor?”

“And a lot of planning.”

She laughs.  She's familiar with how my simple projects can expand.  "You want a hamburger?"

"Please."

"It'll take about four hours."

Somehow, though, it's ready in fifteen minutes.