A day off

Nick has some days off that he needs to take before the end of the year, which is a rather nice thing, so we planned to have a nice Monday, pootling through town, having a nice lunch and going to the cinema. But as with all best laid plans it didn't quite happen like that. We had noticed that the tap in the kitchen had developed a small leak and upon investigation this morning I found that the water was leaking down into the cupboard below and directly on to the plug for the dishwasher. So in my wisdom I thought - get out the B&Q book and have a look on the Internet, it can't be that hard to sort out a washer! Well, within an hour we had figured out how to take the mixer tap apart and removed the cartridge (which contained the ceramic washers), to find that there was a crack in the cartridge casing. Pottering down to Homebase no cartridges were to be found but happily they sent me on to Majit's up in Moseley. There I got lots of advice - including the immortal 'you won't get that back together' in regard to the cartridge now sitting in bits on the counter top. I meant a magnificent man, who by his own words was 'at the end of the line' (dying of terminal cancer), who spent half an hour telling me how to install a tap and picking out the bits I would need, all the while getting later and later for his own appointment. Back home, kitted out with a new set of taps and some flexible pipes, I dug out the pipe cutter and blow torch I had bought for plumbing I was talked out of in the house in Acocks Green. I even found the right adapters and we were ready to go. More B&Q book reading, a youtube video and an hour later (plus a bit of swearing!) and the taps were in place. But everything was leaking. So a liberal quantity of PTFE tape was applied to all screw joints and the leaking stopped. Isn't it amazing that a small amount of tape is the only thing between a flood and a working water system!

We did get time for a quick expedition into town for coffee too.