Yesterday I performed my annual “replace-all-the-broken-sprinkler-heads” ritual. I only needed to replace two this year, and I even bought a couple of extras at the hardware store. After I’d replaced the two broken sprinkler heads, I put the spares away in the garage and found some extras that I’d bought last year. Typical. It still doesn’t seem right, however, that it has snowed for the past couple of days. It’s May, for God’s sake! I shouldn’t be worrying about yard work if it’s snowed the past two days in a row. I’m afraid that winter will run directly into summer, and we won’t have much of a spring to speak of this year.
I also fixed some leaky plumbing, which, of course, turned from a 20-minute job into a two-hour job. The outside faucet near the front yard was leaking and wouldn’t turn off fully nor turn on fully. In addition, the inside shutoff valve for that faucet was dripping in the basement laundry room. I figured it would be a simple matter of removing the faucet and shutoff valve and replacing them with new ones. The shutoff valve was easy, but the faucet had some odd plumbing between it and the shutoff valve. It went from a 1/2″ pipe to a 1/2″-to-3/4″ adapter, then a 3/4″ nipple, then another 3/4″-to-1/2″ adapter, then a 1/2″ nipple, the finally the faucet. I suppose it was done that way to get the correct spacing for the faucet to be right up against the foundation. The 1/2″ nipple was rusted to the old faucet and I couldn’t reuse it without destroying it. A former owner of this house was a plumber and left all sorts of pipes and fittings in the garage, but I couldn’t find the right parts, so I ran to the hardware store and spent $3 to get a 1/2″ coupling and a 1/2″ nipple of the correct length to reach outside the foundation to the new faucet. It was a two-person job, so after I got the pipes threaded by hand, Traci held a wrench inside the laundry room while I turned everything from the outside to get it tightened up. Now, if only it would stop snowing and getting below freezing at night so I could make use of the sprinkler system and outdoor faucets…