Inessentials

We arrived home from our second big trip in the last month late Tuesday night. Of course, the car rental company didn’t have a drop box for the car, so after a midnight run, we had to drive back at 7:00am to return the car that we rented at La Guardia to come home in.

The next day, we laze around, I do some small projects around the house, we each take showers. After running some errands (gosh, we had an empty fridge), we get back to notice that the small water stain in the ceiling below the upstairs bathroom had become a steady drip-drip-drip, every 10 seconds or so. We couldn’t get a plumber out that day, so at 7:00am our plumber came, made some loud bangs, and finally fixed the leak. It ended up being something that I could possibly have fixed, which made me wonder if I should have tried. I had assumed the leak was behind the shower in the pipes, so I never tried to fix it myself. Perhaps I could have done it, given that the problem was mostly one of tightening and caulking. I’ve never done any plumbing work, so that is one of the home repairs I always turn over to the professionals, but now I’m wondering if I couldn’t have done this myself and saved a couple hundred dollars.

I’m generally torn in home repair things, between trying to do things myself and having a professional do it. I see the advantages of each (cost and growing expertise vs. quality and existing expertise), but it’s hard to know when one side is more valuable than the other. For instance, Nicole and I have been talking for a while about renovating our kitchen and bathrooms. How much of the can I do? Demo? Constructing cabinets? Installing cabinets? Installing sinks? I’m not sure, which is part of why we haven’t done it yet.

The problem with not having experience in these things is not having developed the judgment to know when it’s time to hand over the reins to someone else.