Plumbing and Inexperience

I have a cold. A pretty bad one, but I'm on the recovery side of it now, so it's no biggie. I ran a pretty good fever with this one, and as is my custom, I took a hot soak to help the fever along. Now, I've only had a couple of soaks in our tub since we moved in, mostly due to time issue - as in there is never enough of it. In any case, this brand-new tub was installed by the former owner (he owned the house for a six month flip). This brand-new tub is rather shallow, and so in order to get nice and soaky, I have to run the water a little high and it slowly drains into the overflow pipe. IN THEORY. In practice and reality, it did not. Instead, it drained into my garage ceiling (tub is upstairs). We find this out because my son's room is down there. He headed down to bed and was hearing this "drip drip" sound, investigated and found a goodly sized puddle on the floor, and a nice large wet spot in the ceiling. He immediately ran back up to the kitchen, grabbed some pots and bowls, and yelled "we've got a major leak down here!" He was a trooper.

As I hear the mental dollar signs dinging away at a pretty good clip, I get out of the tub and start searching for the origins of the leak. Dan runs down to assess the damage and see if he could find an origin too. No obvious signs. So, I start thinking.... Hmm, the only difference between this and the daily tubs my daughter takes is....the level of the water and the use of the overflow pipe. So, I undo the overflow and sure enough, IT'S NOT HOOKED UP!!! The pipe is there, but it's not attached to the tub. I had some choice words and phrases for the former owner that commented on his skills as a handyman, and his general intellect, as well as calling his parentage into question. This is not the first thing we've found that he did like this. This is not even the second. This is one more in a long series of things done half-a$$ed and cheaper than dirt cheap.

Now, I've never installed a tub, but I can see that the pipe should be attached somehow. I looked over the equipment available and decided to peruse the online do-it-yourself pages to see how to fix this problem. I find a page and see that there is supposed to be a foam gasket between the tub and the pipe. I look at mine and see, aha, there is one, but it wasn't installed right. I look at the page again and try to see how to do it right - no luck. They just say - attach it to the tub. ??? How? I look at the assembly again and realize that there is a metal "flange" thing that is screwed down on the pipe with the foam gasket. Ding ding ding - the bottom of that piece goes on the inside of the tub, the top is attached at the screws and, as you screw it into place, it brings to pipe to the tub, with the foam gasket sealing the whole thing! Aha! Now why couldn't he have figured that out?!? If I've never even looked at tub plumbing before, and this guy does home renovations for a living, why did I have to fix my own freakin' tub?!?!!

Well, the ceiling is dried out, the tub is fixed, and it didn't cost us a thing. I'm very glad I decided to check the obvious before calling a plumber - I don't need to be paying $75 an hour to fix what should have been done right in the first place.

So, the moral of the story.... If you don't know what you are doing and the instructions aren't clear, USE YOUR BRAIN TO FIGURE IT OUT, OR ASK FOR HELP!!! Don't just leave something half-done and hope it all works out okay!!!!!
Now I just get to wait and find out what else he didn't do right....