On Tuesday I walked towards the sink to toss a rag in the cabinet. It made a splash when it landed.
Great.
Sure enough, there was over an inch of water in the cabinet coming from somewhere. This wasn’t the first time (the first time happened during the water escapades of last winter) but it was the first time it happened after we thought everything was fixed. Whatever was going on was going to need repair or replacement, and it was going to have to come from the money I was saving for a living room rug.
Double great.
We are replacing the faucet, which we think is the source of the problem. It’s corroded and leaking thanks to our area’s extreme hard water. Did I ever tell you that our 5 year old, top of the line dishwasher stopped working thanks to hard water? The repair man said that in our part of California a dishwasher is a joke. Residents really shouldn’t use them, or at least not use them and expect them to work well. Washing dishes in the dishwasher is a multi-step, multi-product process. Really, I should just wash them by hand and get over it. I can’t leave a scrap of food on any plate or utensil. No one around here can and expect the washer to do its job. That commercial where the happy homemaker puts an entire cake in the dishwasher and then pulls out a sparkling cake plate after the cycle mocks me and my hard water.
For the last three days my entire sink cabinet has taken residence on my kitchen counters while I grappled with the world stopping decision of which faucet to choose. I’m not one to make decisions quickly (understatement) but the overwhelming selection of ugly faucets on the market coupled with my limited budget was enough to make me consider converting our sink into a trough and calling it a day.
In the end, I picked a faucet under my budget that is perfectly fine. Fine! I normally don’t stop agonizing until every stone has been overturned, every feature considered, every resource scoured. But this week…meh. I had a budget. I went to The Home Depot. I looked for a reliable brand. I picked out a faucet that had most of the features I wanted, but not all. It’s not my favorite faucet, not by a long shot, but it promises to run water into the sink and not my cabinet. Already it’s leaps and bounds above the faucet I had on Monday.
Is this what grown ups do? Make and stick to budgets, buy items that exalt function before form, and decide, in the middle of The Home Depot on a Thursday that $500 is too much for what is, and always will be, nothing more than a faucet? If being a grown up is realizing that not everything can be perfect, that not everything needs to be perfect, and that not everything will ever be perfect no matter how sparkly that cake plate looks when you pull it out, then I have to say I kinda like it.
Ahk–we have hard water, too, and our dishwasher has been on the fritz for years. I totally understand!
This is probably a famous quote that I am misquoting, but it goes along with what you said about perfection–my badass northeastern American Political Thought professor always says, “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
We have super hard water in my area too! Most homes here have water softeners just to make them livable (showers, pipes, dishwashers, etc.). Plus a drinking-water filter to step down from the still-high mineral/salt content of the softened water. Yay.
I love that last line. You’re right – perfection is overrated. Have you read “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” by Barry Schwartz? I think you’d like it.
No, but I will have to check it out at the library. You’re right; it sounds like something I would enjoy.
When you have to replace your dishwasher, get a Miele- it has a built in water softener!! You get your salt from Miele, and pour it in a receptacle in the bottom of the basin, and you’re golden for about 3 months (obviously, the more loads you run, the faster it runs out, but I run at least one load a day and we can go 12 weeks between fills).
We have insanely hard water here in Calgary as well, and the new dishwasher has made an unbelievable difference! I swear I’m taking it with us if we ever move!
I do dishes by h and because I got sick of the poor job my dishwasher did. Now I have come to love the feel of warm water and the wiping of the dishes seems no big deal. My husband always used to say poor people have poor ways…. no w I know being on a budget just makes you think a little more creatively. Now that we are older and money isn’t such a struggle I still think creatively.,