Homesteading is really fun. It’s a constant opportunity to learn something new. You really start to challenge yourself to learn, especially with household enhancements or minor fixes. It’s really good for your personal growth and in the single month we’ve been here at the new house, we’ve had many moments where we’ve looked at something we’ve accomplished and felt really proud. That said, we also have had a number of gigantic fails, one of those being a … plumbing mishap. I’ll tell you more about that I promise. But, let me set the scene for you though.
Let’s go back to when we decided to buy our house. It was a quaint little farm house with the bones of a good home. We knew that a lot of renovation and love would be needed for it to feel more at home, but Sylas and I were both committed to making it ours. One of the things we had requested from our contractor was a smart bidet toilet. The reasoning was that we wanted a toilet that had all of the functionality built in. We quickly realized by looking at stock and supply chain issues that the smart-toilet route wasn’t going to work out. So, we decided to get a fancy bidet toilet seat that had all of the functionality built into it and only needed amateur skills for installation.
We looked for ages and finally settled on the biobidet bliss BB-2000. For those of you who have never tried a bidet – Do it. It saves you toilet paper, saves your time wiping, and is all-around a much more environmentally friendly way to use the bathroom, especially when you consider that we live in the country and all of our waste goes into our septic tank. They aren’t cheap, but in my opinion, it was worth it.
Flash forward a few weeks, we finally receive the toilet seat, our bathroom renovation is coming to an end and is just waiting final touch ups. Sylas and I have the day off because it’s Good Friday (Last week). We THOUGHT it was a good time to install the seat. The instructions were simple, turn off the water at the toilet, unscrew the hose, install a T-Joint, reinstall the hose to the water tank and to the bidet. We THOUGHT nothing could go wrong, but it turns out what was wrong was our judgement.
We get 1/2 way through the installation, the toilet seat is installed on the toilet and we’re about to hook up the hoses. The water was off, Sylas bends down to screw on the hose and BOOM the entire valve that was stopping the water pops off. Water starts shooting into the air, it’s covering our clothes, it’s all over the floor, the walls are getting wet. We both panic and I quickly tell Sylas to run outside and find the water shutoff in the utility room and start grabbing towels and throwing them on the ground.
After 5 minutes the water turns off, my feet are soaked and we realize we have a big problem on our hands. We’re both AMATEUR handy-people at best and we definitely don’t have a PEX-Valve to be able to fix the pipe. We had to call an emergency plumber. Did I mention already this was on Good Friday? This was on Good Friday. We had to wait a few hours for him to arrive and I ended up having to pee in the woods.
The fail is hilarious, in hindsight, but the lesson is important and is one that everyone should heed. Whatever CAN go wrong WILL go wrong… And don’t do amateur ANYTHING on a holiday.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Farm Fail Friday. Stay tuned for more of our antics next month.
Rainbow River Alpacas 