I’ve heard the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished,” and I think my family has now been fully initiated into that vortex. Here’s a true story that happened earlier this month . . .
My son, Robert, was approached by the pastor at the church we go to. Water was coming in around the sump pump line in the pastor’s basement where it exits the wall. The basement wasn’t finished, so it wasn’t a catastrophe, but he wondered if Robert could come and take a look.
So Robert headed over. He discovered that a mouse had chewed through the flimsy corrugated pipe someone had originally installed for the sump pump discharge. He sent the pastor to the hardware store to pick up some replacement fittings. Unfortunately, the fittings turned out to be the wrong ones, and by that point the stores were closed. Robert improvised.
About half the pipe had been eaten away on one side, near the outside of the basement wall, so he cut up a plastic water bottle into repair strips, applied caulking around the damaged area, and then used tie wraps to hold the plastic tightly against the pipe. Since there was no real pressure involved, it seemed likely to hold just fine.
By the time all this was finished, several hours had gone by. Robert went home thinking the temporary repair would probably do the trick, although he also knew the line really should be replaced properly with black poly pipe so that this would never happen again. Unfortunately, the repair didn’t hold.
So back he went again a week later, this time determined to do the whole thing properly. But as anyone who works with repairs knows, one thing leads to another. You never quite have the fitting you need. There are more trips to the store. More adjustments. More improvisation. I think he arrived back at the pastor’s house around five in the afternoon. He didn’t get back to his home until two in the morning.
The job was finally done, and done properly, but it had taken vastly longer than expected. On top of that, the pastor’s house was an hour and a half round trip for each of the two sessions he’d put in. As a thank-you gift, the pastor and his wife gave Robert two, half-gallon bottles of homemade root beer. After a hard half-day’s work that stretched past midnight, Robert brought the bottles home and set them on the kitchen counter. He and his wife went upstairs to bed, with the bottles on a kitchen island.
Not that night but the next one, both of them were awakened by what sounded like an explosion. Not a pop. A big, gunshot-grade bang. Or maybe a hand grenade.
Robert later said he thought someone had blasted out the kitchen windows with a shotgun. There was also the unmistakable sound of breaking glass. He came downstairs in the dark and immediately found himself stepping on glass fragments. There was a strange root beer smell in the air.
When he turned on the lights, he discovered that both bottles had exploded from internal pressure buildup. The chances of both of them going off simultaneously is virtually nil, so one bomb must have set off the other.
Now you might think, “How bad could that really be? It’s just a carbonated soft drink!” Pretty bad, actually. That’s the kitchen in his house below, before cleanup had started.
The flying shards of glass had scattered throughout the kitchen with amazing force and quantity. Glass shards had even flown up the stairs. Some pieces hit the stainless steel refrigerator hard enough to dent it. You can see one dent below. The explosion also shattered the glass in one of the kitchen cabinet doors. And everywhere — absolutely everywhere — there was sticky root beer mixed with sharp glass.
Large shards. Tiny fragments. Root beer coating everything like some sort of sweet adhesive gravy. Robert kept track. The cleanup took nine hours. One cabinet door was especially bad. The center had a hole blown through it that looked like a small brick had hit it, while the rest of the pane was shattered and cracked. That’s he actual door at the top of this post.
Eventually, after the cleanup was complete, Robert brought the damaged cabinet door here to the shop at my place. He had a new piece of glass cut for it. The plan was simple enough: set the glass into the frame and reinstall the retaining strips. But life got busy.
Eventually I had a few spare moments and thought, “I’ll just finish this up for Robert.” Everything was going beautifully. I removed the old retaining strips, installed the glass, and used my pin nailer with short pins to reinstall the strips neatly and cleanly. Perfect tool for the job, I thought.
The pins were disappearing cleanly into the wood. Everything looked excellent. Then I flipped the door over. Some of the pins had curved during penetration and gone right through the front face of the white cabinet door, blowing tiny chips of paint off the MDF frame.
And so now, after all this, I find myself repairing the repair of the repair that followed the cleanup from the exploding thank-you gift that was given after the sump-pump repair.
At this point I can probably make the surface smooth again. The bigger question is whether I can match the paint colour perfectly enough to make the repair disappear. If not, perhaps I can still locate a replacement door for the IKEA kitchen. Unfortunately, the product line was discontinued years ago in 2015. And so the vortex continues.
Total hours spent on this good did? About 30 hours so far, with the door still in question.
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Steve Maxwell
