You know how people say "it will get worse before it gets better".  Like you just need a good ugly cry before you can move on.  Well our bathroom is having an ugly cry moment.  We took a few steps back.

All the water shutoff valves in our house are soldered on, and Paul would like them to be the twist off valve kind.  We  discovered this problem when we were taking out the vanity and there was literally no way to get it out without cutting the back. The holes on the back of the vanity were exactly the size of the pipe,  they slid it into place and then soldered on the valves.  Leaving us with a crappy night and a struggle to get it off.

So that is the back story on this project.  So Paul's dad came over and they planned on simply cutting the pipe and soldering on a new piece that has threads and then adding the screw on valves.  Oh, but we are DIYing this, so something has to go wrong.  The pipe coming our of the wall is not a standard size and none of the supplies they had would work, it is late and hardware stores are all closed. Their next thought was, why don't make a large hole around the pipe because maybe we can get to the right size pipe in the wall and just work from there.  Oh wait, wrong again.   Now we just have a whole in the wall.

So at this point we have a water supply line with no shut off valve coming into our house, our only option seems that we will have to keep the water main into the house shut off for the next day until they can work on it again... We go to my parents and get jugs of water to flush toilets with and to bathe with.  Paul rummages though my parents garage and grabs some garden hose (just the hose no threads on either end) and hose clamps.  

Somehow, that garden hose was the right size to fit over the weird size of pipe snugly .  On one end he clamped the garden hose to the wall, on the other he clamped the old shutoff valve on.  And BAM!  We could turn the water on to do some basic daily things, like shower and flush the toilet...  We turned the water off to the house when we slept and when we left just in case this redneck rig decided to fail and flood our house.   

(He hadn't attached the valve in the below photo, I might have accidentally deleted all of the photos on my camera, so I lack good photos of this little occurrence)

Paul asked me if I was going to put this little failure on the blog.  Clearly the answer is yes.  And here is why I just rambled on forever about our bathroom water shut off valves.  I believe in sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Fixing a house and living live is never always pretty.  I hate the blogs that just share the pretty, like their lives are perfect, not a worry in the world.  It is not like that here, we do stupid things, a lot.  It is all a part of the journey.

-Meg