Jeff Jardine: Home repair: It’s a holiday tradition

The other morning (no, not that morning – the other other morning), something caught my eye in the back bathroom. The toilet seemed to be pointed in a different direction than usual. I’m not much of a plumber, but this much I know: when a toilet is pointed in any direction but the right direction, it is pointed in the wrong direction.

It suggested two things: The toilet is crooked. Check. And there must be a holiday approaching. Check.

At the Jardine home, we don’t need a freebie calendar – with each month featuring a different bank card that has been compromised by Russian hackers – to know what lies ahead. Nor one with photos of European castles where they still get to water their lawns.

Our domicile generally gives us a heads-up when Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s loom because that is when breakdowns or backups are most likely to happen.

The toilet repair job turned out to be nothing more than routine maintenance. A little water leaked but did no damage. It needed a new wax seal ring and a new float valve in the tank. Oh, and don’t forget a new water supply valve because our friends in China made the last one to spray water in every direction unless you turned it completely on or shut it completely off, using pliers or a pipe wrench.

It took an hour or so, our harbinger of the holidays.

This phenomenon began in 1993, the year we bought the home. We knew moving in that one of the double ovens in the kitchen didn’t work and really didn’t care. (We’re the ones who didn’t care. Double ovens are generally unemotional by nature.) We planned to remodel the kitchen soon anyway. We just needed to get through that first Thanksgiving, with a dozen family members due for dinner.

So, of course, on the Wednesday before the Thursday, the remaining working oven stopped working as well. Fortunately, we’d already purchased a new gas range that happened to be sitting out in the garage, still in its box. The house was plumbed for gas. So I shut off the power to the appliances and pulled out both ovens along with the range top next to them. It had a cabinet below it. I cut out the cabinet – a real hack job, I might add – slid gas stove in and hooked it up – we were good to go. I installed some really ugly trim the next morning, and finished painting just as the first folks began to arrive. The kitchen remained that way until we remodeled a few years later.

A giant tree branch came crashing down on a Christmas Eve in 1995 or so. I love the smell of chainsaw exhaust in the morning.

A few years later – New Year’s Eve 1997, to be precise – the rain seeped in from around the rooftop heating/air conditioning unit. Mind you, this leak paled in comparison to the one from New Don Pedro Dam that flooded the Valley a day or so later. Our issue merely involved a section of the dated popcorn acoustic ceiling that, when soaked, took on the consistency of watery oatmeal as it plopped down on top of the piano.

Next came a septic backup on Christmas Eve 2003 or thereabouts. (We laughed when we cried, in spite of ourselves.)

A year or two later, my beloved grandmother stuffed potato peelings into the garbage disposal, clogging the pipes to the tune of a $250 plumber’s bill for an emergency service call. Merry Christmas, dude.

Bless her soul, she managed to repeat the feat a couple of years down the road, claiming that it’s what you were supposed to do with potato peels. Where that logic came from, I have no idea. She never had a disposal in her home. This time, household disaster waited until everyone had gone home before it struck. That evening, the washing machine backed up and overflowed. I happened to get up in the middle of the night to make sure the house alarm had been set. First, I smelled bleach. Then I felt warm water between my toes. That is not a good feeling. My wife and I grabbed every towel we could find to sop it up. You learn that tie-dyed bath towels work the same as bold, solid-colored ones.

A dishwasher quit just before Thanksgiving about three or four years ago. Now, having remodeled the house from end to end, I figured we were due for a prolonged stretch of event-free home ownership.

This week, though, the toilet decided otherwise.

Happy holidays!

This story was originally published November 28, 2015 at 2:52 PM with the headline "Jeff Jardine: Home repair: It’s a holiday tradition."