Nice Guy Handyman (2)

The main reason why we called in a handyman was to come in and repair our 2nd bathroom upstairs. It had a huge gaping hole in the ceiling (can't find the pic I took last month) where the sheetrock was already rotted from steady drip from the hole(s) in the bathroom exhaust vent.

Jeff replaced the venting system w/ aluminum coated vent material, set it up so that there is some sort of a trap (much like a sink trap), patched the ceiling back up, tried to replicate the swirls (didn't too good of a job there, but hey, it's not like people spend a lot of time staring at the ceiling to compare swirls) and painted it up again (he matched the existing paint color). He even left the leftover paint behind for us so we can use it in the future if we need to get more work done.

We also wanted to replace our tub spout whose water diverter had broken off years ago.

It still works, you just have to sort of stick your finger into the hole in the spout. This is okay most of the time but when we have family & visitors come over and you have to explain how to do it... eh.. medyo kahiya.

And while we were doing this, hubby wanted the shower head replaced too.

This is supposed to be easy but the last time we tried doing this ourselves, we broke the shower arm off & left a piece inside the pipe behind the shower wall, we had to pay $150 for a plumber to come & fix it.

I figured, it was worth it to just get a professional to do things right rather than have to pay through the roof to repair what we botched up.

The spout was difficult to do. He had to cut off the existing pipe & solder a new one in. He had to do this a few times before the spout fit, looked and worked right. This wasn't a surprise because we had tried to replace the spout lots of times before. We bought different brands, types, shapes and sizes but none fit the existing pipe.

Lastly, the fill valve in the toilet is also cracked and leaking water big time. We've had to turn the water to this toilet off because water was constantly running all the time and would leak down to the floor.

This, too, is supposedly easy to do but the mechanism inside the tank is stuck to the porcelain due to calcium (hard water buildup). I didn't want to force anything because the last time we (okay... it was me!) did this, the tank cracked and we had to replace the whole thing.

Jeff replaced the toilet tank fill valve ($12 for the part) and the water hose connector ($6 for the part). I checked prices for the parts and his were reasonably-priced.