The Handy Man Returns

From June 2007
Home repair #3
If you are familiar with my blogs from last summer, you'll understand my title. Living alone, without much knowledge of home repair, having a good handy man around is vital! My entry today continues the never-ending saga of dealing with home repairs (and their dent to my wallet).

I had a three day weekend (thanks to a vacation day). I hadn't necessarily planned on working on some of the things at my house that needed repairing, but that's how my time ended up being spent. And in reality, even though I was looking forward to a quiet, peaceful weekend, I'm glad it turned out this way.

Friday morning, while I was still laying lazily in bed, my mom called to tell me that one of my older brothers who was in town visiting, was coming over to check out my sprinkler system. (During dinner the previous evening I had been complaining about how the whole thing needed a major overhaul.) So I jumped out of bed and into the shower. Within an hour they were there with a few tools in hand. We spent the rest of the morning working on the various sprinkler heads, cleaning out clogged ones and re-aiming them to more appropriate parts (rather than the fence - lol). My brother had to catch a flight home that afternoon, and so when he left, I had a small list of a couple of sprinkler heads that needed replacing. I also had a high priority repair where there was a constant leak -- causing me to have a high water bill. Since I had already spoken to someone at work (the same guy that fixed my swamp cooler last summer), I knew he could fix what my brother was unable to.

Amazingly enough, without me even calling, my co-worker/handyman showed up Friday afternoon to make a list of everything that needed to be done. I told him what my brother had already accomplished and he said he be back the next afternoon to finish it all up.

To his and my surprise, there was much more work needed than we thought. He spent quite some time on it all. BUT, my water leak is now fixed - YAY!! And several (more than two) sprinker heads were replaced or adjusted. He only charged me 50 bucks for labor and then $40 for the cost of parts. I offered to pay him more, since it took longer than he thought, but he refused -- what a nice guy!

Saturday night I was excited to run the entire system and give my lawn a thorough soaking without having to pull the hose around. It worked great! And then Sunday we had a down-pouring of rain all day long!! LOL Oh well... my lawn is now very well watered!