“I’ll just take the radiator off” (famous last words)

Final score:

🙌🏻 One beautifully painted bathroom wall.
☔️ Water cascading through the dining room ceiling.
🫣 One very tense husband.
😬 24 hours without water or heating.
🔧 And finally, one plumber. Eventually.

Don’t you just hate those stories where a random life story turns into a business lesson? Yup, me too, but I'm going to share my 'what could possibly go wrong if I take this radiator off the wall?' adventure anyway.

Let's set the scene ...

We moved last year and the bathroom at our new home is a disturbingly 1990s time capsule.

Before: the 1990s time capsule

Think: brown speckled tiles, shiny laminate cabinets and a medicine cabinet over the loo.

(Last week one of the kids told me they dropped the toothpaste into the loo ... "but don't worry I rinsed it under the tap"! 😬)

Unwilling to spend £££s on a full refit when we have an actual renovation project planned for next year, but unable to cope any longer with the dated ugliness, a plan was born for a 'quick, easy, and inexpensive' makeover.

Why I'm dangerous

I love fixing things, and I'm usually pretty handy. Give me a problem and I’ll happily throw on my 'I'm a resourceful superhero cape', which is exactly what makes me dangerous. Asking for help? I hate it (almost as much as I hate admitting defeat).

Everything was going swimmingly until I reached the heated towel rail. Obviously, painting behind it would be easier if it wasn’t there. I mulled it over and felt confident we could take it off the wall, paint and stick it back up again.

You can probably guess how that went.

In my defence, I’d watched YouTube

I knew exactly how to close the valves and take the towel rail down. Trouble is, what YouTube didn’t mention is how damn heavy this particular rail is. Even with my husband helping, we couldn’t undo one of the nuts and one side simply refused to leave the wall. 😅

We now had a towel rail half on the wall and half off it. Clearly the only thing to do was prop it up and paint quickly. Spoiler alert: the sheer weight of the damn thing put too much pressure on the pipes underneath ... and that's why we found water cascading through the dining room ceiling. ☔️

One of home ownership’s great mysteries: how do you set out to paint one small patch of wall and end up with a water feature in the dining room?

Marriage counselling needed?

Ashton loves that I’m practical (he hates DIY), but when things go wrong his stress level rockets. That day, with water raining through the ceiling, he was one tense, grumpy and properly stressed man.

See also: the time the house alarm screeched for an hour and nothing would stop it, even with the right code. I ended up dismantling the whole thing in the hall cupboard while he got steadily more stressed ... that’s a story for another post. 😆

Anyway, back to the flood.

ChatGPT had questions. I had no answers.

It was Saturday night, and I wasn’t paying emergency rates for a plumber. Plus, as established, I’d much rather fix things myself than ask for help.

And after all, what’s one night without running water or heating?

Plus, surely me and ChatGPT could figure this out.

I could tell you now about the loooooong chat and endless technical questions I attempted to answer about our plumbing system (sealed or gravity fed system? no idea). And how my camera roll is now full of pictures of the boiler, various pipes, and the solar thermal tank in the airing cupboard.

The more time I spent, the more invested I got. I was practically a plumber already, so ringing one now would have felt like admitting defeat.

Luckily for Ashton's sanity, I finally reluctantly admitted to myself that guessing how everything works would only lead to more damage and even more expense and inconvenience.

When to ask for help (apparently, sooner than I did)

I love that I’m resourceful and can solve problems. But even I have to admit that spending hours interrogating the internet isn’t the best use of my time, when someone who knows what they’re doing could get it sorted quickly and easily. I’m pretty sure I could have spent those hours doing something far more constructive, because I ended up calling a plumber anyway. (Thanks for squeezing us into an already overbooked day, Dave).

I promised you a business angle on this, here it comes, brace yourself!

My clients do this with their businesses all the time, especially when it comes to asking for help and especially the most resourceful ones. They can figure almost anything out, so asking for help feels like cheating. They’ll spend weeks rewriting the same page of their website, or ask ChatGPT for 10 more versions of a post, and the more effort they put in, the harder it gets to admit they need someone else. Meanwhile the enquiries still aren’t coming in.

Dave sorted our leak in less than an hour. It took me a Saturday night and half of Sunday, plus a camera roll full of pipework, to get as far as ringing him.

Any of this resonate? Tell me I'm not the only one!
(Plus if you want to get unstuck with your business questions you'll love THE RUNWAY!)