I do not know how I could live in this world without duct tape.
You know what I mean – if you should be in the kitchen and suddenly hear a “drop, drop, drop” sound coming from the sink area, you will likely creep over to the sink, and jerk open the cabinet door.
You see just what you had feared, a large and rapid “drip, drip” coming from the pipes under the sink!
In this particular instance, it was I who discovered the awful ‘drip drip’ under the sink, so I quickly managed to get a towel underneath the dripping pipe, then put a pan on the towel, under the drip.
“There,” I thought. “That will hold it until I can call a plumber!”
I went quickly to the telephone, looked up “plumbers” in my directory, and dialed the number right away!
I got an answering machine.
At last, after dialing three of the four numbers listed, I got a human voice.
A man answered, I asked if this were “Phamous Plumbers” (the name I had that number listed under) and he said, “Yep, you got us!”
“Oh good,” I said, before explaining my dripping-pipe problem to him.
He said, “Yes ma-am, we’ll come right out!”
He asked for me to give him my address, and I did, but I then put a hold on his enthusiasm – I needed to know what to expect to pay for a kitchen pipe repair.
“Uh, how much do you charge per visit?” I asked.
He said I could expect to pay “$85 to come out” and then a bit more, depending on how bad my pipes were.
“There’s not a problem, is there?” He asked.
“Uh, you don’t think a little drip would cost a whole lot do you?” I asked, hesitantly.
“Well ma-am, I’ll just have to see. Sometimes a little drip can come from a very faulty waterline, and then we will have to rip out all the waterlines and replace them. That could cost quite a bit!” He explained. “I just don’t want you to be surprised if that happens.
At this point, I was biting my fingernails anxiously, and after a moment of thinking, I responded, “Uh, maybe I better wait on that!”
He took it fairly well and replied with an: “Ok lady…if you need us, call us back!”
I promised I would.
As I hung up the phone, I was reeling from the plumber’s potential cost! What has happened to our economy that a simple pipe fix could cost so much? There had to be something else I could do.
I hurried back to the kitchen and found that, even with a pan and towel under the sink, the dripping water had run out of the cabinet, and was now puddled on the floor.
I grabbed the mop, emptied the little pan, and changed the towel under the sink, all while continuing to fret.
“What can I do?” I mused, repeating the question to myself as I dried up the drip-water mess on my kitchen floor. “What can I do?”
There had to be a solution!
I was getting frantic at this point, so I ran to the utility closet, jerked it open and my eyes journeyed from the top to the bottom, looking for something, anything, to help with the pipe problem under my kitchen sink.
“But what will help?” I asked.
Then I saw it! A huge, sturdy roll of duct tape.
I grabbed the roll from the closet, hurried back to the kitchen sink and opened the cabinet dors. First, I wiped the leak and pipe as dry as I could. Then I opened the duct tape and pulled a long piece off, then wrapped the tape as tightly as I could all around the pipe joint, as well as the pipe around the joint.
Several times I had to wrap more tape, dry off the pipe and continue and once I felt I had secured enough of that grey tape on the pipe, I sat back and waited.
An hour later, I checked back on the leak and found that the area was still dry and the tape was holding.
I was elated!
The next morning, the tape was still working and today, when I did my check-in on the pipe, the tape was still holding the leak back.
Since then, I carry a roll of duct tape with me everywhere. I have fixed a dress hem with it, a leaking tire, and taped the back fender back onto my little car (after an unfortunate incident with the small, and in the way, telephone transmitter, that gad been put in my yard).
I fixed all of those problems with duct tape, for only $2.75-per roll!
Be safe, be kind, and look for the love in life!
Later friends,
Patricia Ann Hinson Mordes