A Day in My Life

Since owning my house, I have only had to make one improvement to the house which was replacing the garage door opener. My old one went out one morning before work – not a convenient time to say the least. Thankfully, one of the guys that works for my dad also works on garage doors on the side. He was able to come out rather quickly and replaced it with a used unit. Since I have already been here for two and a half years, I thought I was doing pretty well. That record was broken last weekend.

We had Bethany’s sister Rachel, her husband Paul, and their new baby Abram staying with us for a few days last week. I had noticed that the water heater had a small leak a few weeks ago, but I didn’t think that it was anything to be really worried about. I knew that we would have to start thinking about having it replaced fairly soon, but since it was only a small drip, we had some time. While they were staying with us, I mentioned to Paul that it had started to leak ever so slightly a little while ago and asked his opinion on it. He thought we should go take a look at it that night. It is a good thing we did! That thing had really started to leak. Now instead of a small drip, we had Niagara Falls on our hands! Well, not quite that bad, but it had grown significantly worse. He told me that it would have to be replaced, and soon. I gave a call to my friend Marc hoping he may know a plumber as I had never had to call one before. He pointed me towards Paul the Plumber. I left him a message that night asking if he would be available in the next day or two to replace our water heater. Paul called me the next morning and we set up a time for first thing Saturday morning.

Saturday rolled along and Paul showed up around 8:30 and jumped right to work. He had brought out a new water heater that he compared as being the Buick of water heaters. Since I’m not really a GM fan, I was a little skeptical right off the bat. He assured me that it was a step above anything that you would find at Menards, so he dove right in. He had the old one ripped out in no time at all. While doing the work, he found that the valve that controlled the water flow from the main wasn’t working properly so he put in a new value that would actually do what it was supposed to do. He also had to adjust the pipe length because the new heater was slightly taller than the old one. After some quick pipe cutting and soldering, it was ready to be installed. This also took him no time at all. When it was all said and done, he was here for about two hours. I was extremely grateful to Paul for coming on what is normally his day off. He was very pleasant and very knowledgeable. I now have no doubt who I’ll be calling for all my future plumbing needs.

I didn’t think to take a picture of what the old heater looked like. That would really have made for an interesting pic. However, I do have a picture of what our new “Buick” water heater looks like.