I’ve had to hire a professional plumber for several jobs that I thought I could handle on my own.
What started out as a simple project turned into a time-consuming, frustrating, expensive mess.
At one point, I decided to replace my kitchen faucet. I’ve installed faucets before. The process isn’t all that difficult. It simply requires the proper tools, some time and patience. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remove the old faucet. The connections were so badly corroded that I couldn’t get them apart. I tried buying a bigger and better pipe wrench but had no luck. I bought WD40 and sprayed the connections multiple times. I even purchased a specialized wrench for hard-to-reach areas and still couldn’t remove the old faucet. After several days of attacking the same problem in different ways, I gave up and called a plumber. The plumber actually cut the old pipes and replaced everything with new. Although the job ended up costing a lot more than I anticipated, the final result was much better than I could have accomplished. I got into another impossible challenge when the toilet wouldn’t quit running. Although I had never replaced the guts of a toilet, I knew that it was pretty straightforward. I googled the process just to be safe. The first step required that I turn off the water supply to the toilet. I found the shut-off valve near the floor behind the toilet. No matter how many times I turned the valve, the water never shut off. I determined that replacing the water shut-off valve was beyond my capabilities. Once again, it cost me a lot more money to hire a licensed plumber to come to the house and complete a very simple job. Just recently, my water pump wouldn’t start up at all. There was no running water in the house. Assuming that a failed water pump definitely required the skills of a professional, I hired a plumber. The water pump is located outside. The plumber removed the cap covering the electrical wires and found ants had infested it. He sprayed the area with ant poison, cleaned the wires with a fine sandpaper and had the pump running in ten minutes.