DDIY ~ Don’t Do It Yourself

Hon,

You are a smart man.

You are a strong man.

You are a handsome man.

You aren’t a handyman.

Hire someone else to do this, please!

Kevin and I have a long history of semi-disastrous Do It Yourself projects.  I think it’s because we think we’re smart – or maybe we’re just cheap. Both of us, despite years of proof to the contrary, believe that we can do anything that we can read about.

Take this weekend, for instance. Our 23^rd anniversary started with an eerie smell emanating from the basement bathroom. Naturally, we both thought perhaps there was a clog in the toilet. Plunging resulted in sewage seeping up through the bathtub drain… eeeewww.

Our next logical thought was that the septic tank needed to be pumped. We’ve had a rainy spring and it’s been five years since we’d had it done. Mr. Router happily obliged us with a $400.00 house call. Goodbye, anniversary gifts, baby sitter & dinner at an upscale restaurant.

Then Mr. Router gave us the bad news. The septic tank wasn’t the problem – the ejector pump needed to be replaced. Estimate:  $1, 200.00 more… Goodbye, ever eating out again.

So, what do two smart people do in this situation? Look it up on the internet!  If someone can describe how to install a pump in four paragraphs how hard could it really be? All we needed was a wet/dry vacuum, tools and some time.

And rubber gloves… and old towels… and no sense of smell… Kevin gamely bought a shop vac and began to remove the foul smelling stuff from the mysterious hole in the basement floor.  Several hours later, with no end to the ooze in sight and no good way of handling the waste we came to the conclusion that $1,200.00 was a very fair price.

Some anniversaries are silver. Some are gold. This one was just plain sh*@.