Friday, April 2, 2010

Add a day...

I am going to preface this post by saying, my husband is a wonderful man. He is so smart and can figure out how to do just about anything. This is a great thing when our budget has shrunk, money is tight, and things often break or stop working around the house.

The down side is that whenever he tells me how long it is going to take to fix something, it always ends up taking longer. I have learned that whatever time frame he tells me, I have to...add a day. Let me share a couple of examples.

Two weekends ago, I was away in Detroit at a reading conference. I left on Thursday night and did not return home until Monday evening. Jeff had to take the girls to school on Friday morning and on Friday afternoon, he had to attend Genevieve's last volleyball practice but the rest of the weekend he had free to work on the plumbing in the house, as the girls would be staying with Nama and Papa.

His plan for the house was to install two new water heaters and a new rust remover, and to replumb the entire house. Our well water is very iron-y and our old rust remover stopped working several years ago. This caused iron build-up inside all the pipes. It was so bad that at times there wasn't enough pressure through the water heater to even make it kick on. Ice cold showers might wake me up in the morning, but they don't make me a ray of sunshine to be around!

He said he could have the job all done by the time I got home on Monday. Now, to me, having the job done means that everything looks the same as it did before I left. Apparently, he and I have differing definitions. On my way home Monday, he called from G's volleyball game and said, "Ignore the mess. It's going to take me one more day to clean stuff up." Yep, that's right, add a day!

Again, I will sing his praises and say hallelujah for water. Hot water. With pressure to run out the sink and shower at the same time. However, he had also hoped during that weekend to replace the pump in the well. There wasn't time for that, so it got put on the to-do list.

At the beginning of last week he asked me if I wanted him to replace the pump this week on Wednesday or Thursday. I had to work Monday through Thursday, so I asked him how long it would take. He very confidently said, "It should only take me a couple of hours. I can get it done while you are at work." Scenarios began flashing through my mind and I told him I wanted him to do it Thursday. Any guesses why? That's right, I had to work Thursday but not Friday. By adding a day, I knew that the day after he started the work, I'd be out of water because he wouldn't be done yet. I didn't want that day to be a day I had to get ready for work.

So, you may be asking yourself, did she underestimate her husband? Surely he was able to change the pump in a day. Well friends, I am writing this blog post from the office in my dad's house. I spent the night here last night (Thursday night) because...he wasn't done yet.

To be fair, Jeff ran into many obstacles in his quest to install a new pump. I won't go into them here. I will say that when he finally does finish, I know the water will work fantastically. But I will continue to stand by my motto that whenever he tells me how long a job will take, I add a day.

1 comment:

  1. Let's hope it's just one day... My husband is our fix-it guy too. He's pretty incredible at fixing things, considering he's a high school and director! But... we have definitely had our share of oopsies! Hope you have your water soon!

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