Home Disrepair

I pretty much hate fixing things around the house—although this feeling is not really informed by experience, because, generally, when I attempt to repair anything—faucet, window blind, clamp that holds the hand-held shower head to the bar on which it slides up and down—I end up making it worse and then have to struggle to get things back to the state of broken-but-usable that we’d been living with for as long as anyone can remember.

Today, I got all energized to replace the aforementioned clamp. It’s a cheap piece of plastic that cracked in half more than a year ago, a mere nine months into its usable life.

Since then, we’ve made due perfectly well with the shower head zip-tied to the pole. Granted, you can’t remove it to wash your back or privates, but at least you don’t have to hold the thing over your head with one hand while soaping yourself up with the other.

It took me no longer than five minutes to completely strip the head on one of the screws that holds the bar into the wall. Subsequent attempts to either remove the damn thing or just tighten it back down proved fruitless except as a means of engendering four-letter diatribes issuing from my mouth.

Arriving at the plumbing supply store with the broken part in hand was similarly frustrating. I was told in no uncertain terms that I needed to have the manufacturer and part number in order to order a replacement that might not even be available if I did have the proper information.

So now, several hours later, the whole shower head contraption is worse off than it was before I started trying to fix it. All my efforts have just made things worse.

What this tells me, though, isn’t entirely depressing: it’s clear from this experience that the best thing I can do in the cause of home improvement is, thankfully, nothing at all.