Digital Analogue

Handyman?

Ooh, looking over the last post, I realised I forgot the best part of the day! When I arrived at the closing, early, I was directed into a conference room, and within a minute, most of the closing staff had converged on me---more than ten minutes before the appointment---and so we started. Early on, someone said, "you brought the check, right?"

"I brought my checkbook...." (and mere punctuation cannot convey the intonation here: assertion, about which I have no question, plus shades of "is that okay?" as well as "why do you ask?")

"Oh, that's not enough." Of course, this was me being an idiot; I knew from having heard enough other horror stories that one brings a cashier's or some other certified form of check to a closing. In my defence, nobody actually told me to do this here, but I suppose I should've known. I looked at my watch, still not even 2:30, so I offered to run across the street to my bank and cut the check. But no, they said, we could do that later.

So then, after signing approximately six thousand documents, the closing was pretty much done; my realtor commented that the disbursements from the title company probably wouldn't happen until I got my check, but the title company woman said, naw, that's alright, he can just bring it later. So she gave out the various checks to the realtors. She gave me my closing gift (one of those Off! mosquito candles) and a little sticky note with the amount the check needed to be for. And then I walked over to my bank, cut the check, and brought it back. Yay small town life!

Incidentally, clicking on the picture at the bottom of the last post, or here, takes you to a small gallery of house photos, in case you missed that before.

Anyway, today was Plumbing Day at casa blahedo; in addition to some assorted miscellaneous cleaning, I took apart my faucet---the leaky one---to figure out how it worked, and then went out and bought a new one. It's verra nice-ah. Brushed metal (nickel, I think), two handles, and this huge swooping faucet tap that will make washing pots and pans and such a breeze. I also bought a shower head, but that can't be installed until I get another piece to connect it; the pipe is much too narrow to fit the modern standard shower head. I also need to get a new, longer faucet for the downstairs bathroom that doesn't force you to jam your hands up against the porcelain to get them wet, but now that I'm an old hand at faucet installation, that shouldn't be any problem at all.

I certainly have nothing against paying someone to do work I can't do; and I don't particularly mind paying for someone to do work I can do, especially if it frees me up to do something else more interesting. But the big advantage of DIY work is that you get a really good understanding of how the various subsystems of your house work. Aside from the faucets, the other day I took apart my locks and brought in the cylinders to be re-keyed; I really grok my locks now.

Not sure what's next, though. Plaster, maybe.

"It's nice to see someone at least as concerned about people who have successfully escaped the uterus as they are about a group of cells who are simply laying around doing nothing at the Petri Dish Hilton." --Jim Leach