I have to strt this by saying I am a terrible housekeeper. I can always find more interesting thisngs to do than clean and I hate to throw stuff out.
So my bathtub faucet has been dripping and I decided to try to fix it. I have replaced sink washers before so I thought I would be able to do this. Got the cap thingy off, got the scew out, pried the handle off. uncrewed the cap thing behind the handle and got stuck. The hex shaped nut won’t budge, now the bad part is the cap thing fits inside and now won’t go back in. So I can’t go further and I can’t go back. Fortunatly I have another bathroom but did I mention I made the leak worse? It is now stream of water. So I am turning off the water to the house when I don’t need it (next to the tub) and trying to clean house enought to make a path for someone else to get into the house. Making some progress but it is slow. I have too much stuff. To cap all of this off, I have to be out of town for about five days the middle of this week and will have to work next weekend to make up for it so I don’t know when I will able to be at home to have a plumber come in once I make a path throught the house. I hope all this turning the water on and off won’t mess something else up.
I know this is my own fault for being a slob. on a positve note I will be able to fix some of the other things I have put off because I didn’t want anyone else to see how awful my house is.
Thank goodness very few people here know who I really am.
Do you know if there is an access panel to your tub in the room opposite the faucet end of the tub? There may be a shutoff to the water there if you have one. If you can get the water to just the tub turned off you might feel a little less rushed in having to get it fixed.
By the way, I had a leaky kitchen sink. I did not want to have anyone in to repair it both for money reasons and my house is a mess reasons. I shut off the water to the sink (after much difficulty and swearing) and took to washing dishes in the bathroom sink. I ended up working on removing the leaky pipe myself and then took it to the plumbers that we use at my office to see if they could just sell me the pipe. They ended up cutting the pipe to match the ones I showed them and they didn’t charge me anything, mostly because the place I work has spent so much money with them lately and I was the one who originally hired them. So I took my pipes home, tried to put them on, got frustrated, swore a lot. Gave up for a while. Tried again later and managed to fix it myself and it only took several weeks total! But I fixed it!
I don’t want this to sound insulting, but I think that you ought to look in to some counseling for hoarding. I think a whole lot of us are embarrassed by the state of our houses when unexpected visitors show up, but if you need multiple days to clear enough of a path so that someone can even get in, you’ve gone beyond “stuffitis”. That level of mess affects your physical and mental health, and it’s so hard to break out of that you stop getting necessary things done.
Read this thread for a lot of sympathetic opinions on hoarding.
But I fixed it!