A long-time property owner with a lot on his plate, he often relied on his trusty local shop to install appliances.  But one day, when one of the main heaters in his prize building went Kaput, it turned out the plumber he had on speed dial was on vacation.

No problem, he thought to himself.  I’ll just go change it out myself.

Except that it was a problem. First, he had a lot of trouble unhooking the hoses.  Then, he ended up wrestling with the darn thing for the better part of an hour.  Which would have been okay, except he called me in to help out.

Between the both of us, we eventually got the job done, but in the process, we learned a lot about how to do what we were doing.  Specifically, if you’ve got someone like a Raleigh plumber who will volunteer to do that stuff for you, take them up on it.  When you factor in time spent getting the hoses on and off, buying new appliances, running out to the dump, and most of all, muscling the thing out from the cramped basement of a 14-unit building, you’re definitely best off paying off someone else to fix what’s broken.

Sure, you can persist in the idea that just because you hauled something heavy up a flight of stairs, you earned your “daily bread”…or you can get smart and just call around.  So your usual plumber’s out?  That’s really okay: a lot more are able to get out to your property.  And that means you have no excuse for relentlessly pursuing DIY options beyond your purview.  Or asking your best friend to come along.

That, in fact, was the subject of a discussion that took most of that hour in the basement – discussion of all of the other things we could have been doing, punctuated by grunting, sighing and the occasional “No kidding!”…except that for some reason he kept calling me Sherlock.  Well, take this tip from Sherlock and go get yourself two or three Raleigh plumbers on speed dial.