I Told You So!

I thought I'd tell you a little story that I'm sure many, many of you can relate to. A few months back, I noticed the faucet on our kitchen sink seemed to be leaking, so I told Hubby he needed to replace it. (Yeah, we do the traditional role stuff around here, which means that for the most part, he's supposed to fix things and I'm supposed to complain about them.) At first he couldn't see that it was leaking because it was just a little trickle out of the base of the faucet that ran down into the sink. Then, once he acknowledged the leak, he wanted to wait until Soccer Son could help him replace the faucet. (After all, why hire someone when you can do it yourself, right? And since Hubby's the son of a man who raised six kids on a plumber's salary, fixing a leaking faucet himself is probably a point of pride.)

Time passed and Soccer Son never found time to help replace the faucet and the trickle continued unabated. (Hubby's disabled with muscular dystrophy and doing the job himself is beyond him, yet he never wants my help.) One day about a month ago, Hubby called me at work to ask if I'd noticed water on the kitchen floor before I left for work. No, I hadn't, but shortly after I left, it appears we had a major leak because when Hubby came out to the kitchen, there was water everywhere.

Of course THEN he had to fix the faucet, right?

Nope. Because by this time, he started thinking that if we were going to get a new faucet, maybe we needed to replace the kitchen sink too. And all of that would take some shopping around and comparing prices. In the meantime, a bit of tightening and a bucket under the sink to catch the drips would do just fine.

When I came home from vacation with my friends, I had a new kitchen sink, but the new faucet wasn't working quite right. Hubby had a handyman lined up to come in a few days later to do some repairs, and figuring out what was wrong with the faucet was one of the things on the list.

One evening, when I came home from work, Hubby rather proudly showed me the new faucet was fixed and was working just fine now. Hurray! However, my nose detected an odd and unpleasant odor, so I opened the cupboard and looked under the sink. Here's what I saw:

"Honey, why is there a hole in the bottom of our cabinet?," I asked. Hubby explained that when the handyman got down under the sink, his hand just went though the bottom of the cabinet--it was quite obviously rotted out from all the moisture over the last several months of waiting to fix the faucet.

Tomorrow the handyman's coming back to fix the floor of the cabinet.

In every marriage there comes a time when a husband or wife is just dying to tell the other spouse, "I told you so." Actually, I think it's more accurate to say that time comes along about as often as city buses. But then you think better of it and don't say anything. You just blog about it. By the way, don't tell Hubby I told you, okay?