Following on from last time’s thrilling heroics, I spent some of the weekend slapping my pipe (ooh vicar!) The tap I bought wouldn’t accept the adapter for the moveable dishwasher we have. I bought a second adapter to see if that would help, which broke off inside the tap without sealing it up, so the tap went back and I installed another replacement. After some fiddling, and yet another trip to the store to buy yet another adapter, this one works just fine.

That should be enough, one would think, for one week in the world of plumbing. But no. Wandering the basement trying to find some pliers, I noticed that a section of pipe had sprung a leak. Not a joint or corner, just a standard length of pipe, sheltered under the floor joists, with nothing rubbing on it or draft blowing to promote freezing. Just a hole in a pipe. Fortunately this was fixed with a resin-impregnated pipe bandage (which I cunningly bought on a combined trip to get the new tap), so I kept my total for visits in single digits.

Did I mention I hate DIY?

I remembering reading a story years ago whose moral was that, no matter how small the home improvement task you’re engaged in, it will always require three trips to the hardware store. Our kitchen tap (that’s a faucet, but I can’t say that word without sounding stupid or Canadian or something, so humo(u)r me and we’ll call it a tap). Trip one was to get a replacement cartridge, which turned out to be a daunting prospect – it looked like a tour of several plumbing shops would be required. Being easily daunted, I switched to plan B, and took home a nice yet cheap replacement tap. Trip two was, as you may already have guessed, to get the connector bits that the new tap needed that the old one didn’t. I got home, screwed everything together, only to have it leak.

Now at this point the inevitable third trip was looming. In an attempt to deny my fate, I called the manufacturers and they’re sending a new cartridge for the new tap (yes, I just realized that I could have done that with the old one. The new one is really much nicer though. Honestly.) “Fate denied!” you’re thinking. Paul laughs in the face of destiny, and tweaks the nose of the crappy Reader’s Digest article that kicked all this off, right?. Sadly, no. See, the thing about inevitability is it’s sheer…inevitability. The drain from the sink was on its last legs, and my thrashings around under the sink seem to have been more than it can take, so I’m off to the hardware store after dinner for some replacement pipe. Trip three.