A Plumbing Adventure
Using pliers to manipulate wire on a hack toilet plumbing job.
My spouse, Mr. Transportation, installed a new flapper valve on our toilet yesterday. This morning he left on a work trip. Hours later, I flushed the toilet and was puzzled by what sounded like a spray of water. I lifted the lid of the tank and found the refill tube loose, pointing upward, and of course as soon as I lifted the tank lid, it started spraying water all over the bathroom.
I have a degree in engineering. I understand a lot of physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and so on, so I feel confident that I could fix problems around the house, such as basic toilet plumbing problems. But I also have a business degree, and I subscribe wholeheartedly to the efficiency of specialization. In our relationship, I handle things like the finances and our social calendar, and I leave plumbing, mechanical, and electrical problems to Mr. Transportation.
Part of the reason for this separation of duties is experience, and part of it is our views on organization. I like for tools to have a specific place that makes practical sense. For example, in the kitchen the spatulas and cooking spoons are stored separately in a drawer right next to the stove so that without even looking I know where to reach to find what I need. Mr. Transportation instead likes to quickly put things away and rely on his rather remarkable memory to find them again in the future. He usually knows exactly where to go to find the tool he wants, but for me it’s an exercise in frustration. The screws might be in a drawer with the vice grips or the wrenches when I would expect them to be next to the screwdrivers. For me to share maintenance duties with my husband, we would need to store two sets of tools.
Naturally, specialization backfires when the specialist becomes unavailable to fix the problem within his specialty. It was up to me to fix the toilet. I FaceTimed Mr. Transportation and asked him to walk me through finding the tools and fixing the toilet, and then I asked Pumpkin, my 5 year old, if she wanted to help. She readily accepted. (The drawback to the invitation is that it makes a 20 minute task take an hour, but the plus side is that it’s one less hour of her watching TV, and she might learn a valuable lesson in the process.)
Mr. Transportation directed us to a piece of wire and some pliers. He explained how to turn the water off at the wall, use the pliers to cut the wire, and secure the refill tube (pointing downward!) against the overflow tube with the wire (the clip on the refill tube was too big for the hole on which it was meant to lock). The hardest part was figuring out how to cut the wire with the pliers, which were on a multi-use tool. Pumpkin did all of the work herself. I was merely there to provide alternate wording or demonstrations if she didn’t understand what her dad was saying.
Pumpkin and I cheered when we finally tested our fix and the toilet worked as expected. I exclaimed, “Yay! We fixed it!” Pumpkin brightly responded, “I wish it wasn't fixed and that I could still be working on it. That was so satisfying!” As Pumpkin discovered, tackling a small home repair like that has the potential to help with our happiness in several ways. Firstly, our expectations to begin with might be low: we may feel intimidated or overwhelmed by the problem, but addressing it step-by-step and with instruction, we find ourselves able to overcome the problem. When the outcome is positive (we fix the problem), and we reflect on the fact that initially we thought we might not be able to fix it, we get an even bigger boost to our short-term happiness—the outcome far exceeds our expectations. In addition, learning something in the process helps with our growth needs and the success helps with our confidence in tackling future issues (esteem, autonomy).
Mr. Transportation would tell you that home repairs also have the potential to quash happiness, such as when one expects the problem to require an easy fix and it ends up being much more difficult to solve or when one makes an error that requires a professional to fix (esteem).
Have you tackled any home repairs lately? Did the experience leave you happier or angrier?