Tue, 22 Sep 2026
[ Content warning: mundane, rambly, neurotic. ]
A couple of years back I wrote a long whiny blog article about putting up some shelves in the bathroom and how miserable it had made me to do it. I said:
When I put up shelves in the bathroom back in May, I was a psychological mess. For every little thing that went wrong — and there were quite a lot — I got all stressed out and wondered why I dared to perform this task. The outcome was good, but I had a lot of stress getting there.
Through the whole thing I felt like I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know if I was about to make some terrible mistake that would ruin the whole project, and I didn't know if I was about to produce a humiliating disaster that a professional would have to be called in to do over.
This is a lot of bad feeling for a project that, in hindsight, went smoothly and ended in success. I finished timely. The shelves served us well until we moved out eight or nine years later. I don't think that most of the people who came through there thought anything like “gosh, I wonder what incompetent installed these ridiculous shelves?”.
Anyway that is not what I planned to talk about this time.
I loathe home repair
In our laundry room the washer dumps its outflow into a deep plastic sink with a drain, which we call a "tub". A while back the tub developed a big crack in its bottom that was leaked dirty water onto the floor. We put a bucket underneath, but that is just a workaround, not an actual solution.
I thought with displeasure of the two unpalatable choices for replacing the rub with a new one. I could pay a plumber to do it, and it would probably be done competently, but would cost a lot of money. Or I could attempt to do it myself, and it might be done competently, and it might cost much less money… or I might be taking the first step on the road to Hell.
If I were to attempt it myself, I would not only have to learn how to do the task, and then get it right the first time, I would also have to figure out on the fly how to fix the parts of the task I didn't get right the first time. The worst case here could be very bad, much worse than just “oh well, guess I'll have to call the plumber”. There are a lot of ways it can go very wrong.
I'd have to buy supplies, the right supplies, and if I discovered partway through that I didn't have the right supplies or tools I'd have to stop work and go back to the store for the right ones, interrupting the project. Or maybe the store has closed and we are without laundry service until it reopens.
If I didn't get the task done right the first time, I would need new supplies to try again, and maybe additional supplies to fix the mistake.
I might break something else that wasn't broken to begin with.
I do not find this kind of work fun. I hate it, and the longer it goes on the more I hate it. By trying to replace the tub myself I might be stepping into a tar pit.
This isn't just neurosis. There are projects in my house that I thought would be straightforward that are perpetually unfinished for exactly this sort of reason: I started, and something went wrong that I didn't know how to fix.
In these kinds of jobs there is often some subtask where you have to get two parts together by forcing them, or there is often some subtask where you have to cajole two parts together but forcing them will ruin them. If you mistake the second kind of subtask for the first you have the fun of putting the broken parts in the trash and starting over, or maybe just hurling yourself into the sea.
So instead of replacing the tub, I thought that I could try an easy intervention: I could try to seal the crack with silicone goo. It might not work at all, but it would be quick and easy to try, and it wouldn't make the problem worse than it already was — the tub was already leaking. And I had the silicone in the house already.
I did that and it seemed to work, so with relief I put it out of my mind for a while.
Return of the leak
Time passed and last week I learned that the tub was leaking again. I took a look into the tub and saw that the silicone from last time seemed to be holding okay, but that the crack had gotten bigger.
I was disappointed. I had hoped that the silicone would solve the problem. But it appeared that it hadn't, and the leak was just going to keep coming back. The silicone hadn't worked, except as a short-term workaround, and it seemed I would need to replace the tub anyway.
Probably, I thought, if I knew what I was doing, I would have known that silicone goo is not the right way to fix something like this. Maybe someone who knew the right way would have scoffed and said “Silicone? Pff, don't you know that stuff will start coming off in two weeks?” Or maybe “Pff, that crack is just going to spread.”
But I went and glumly patched the new, bigger crack with more silicone to give me some time to think about what to do to take care of the problem for good.
Work diary to the rescue
And then something magic happened. I went to make a note about it in my work diary.
The work diary is just an attempt to track stuff at home with a ticketing system. similar to how I do when I'm at work. Each task I need to do is a ticket, and starts out as a mostly blank page. When I work on a task, I make a note in the ticket about what I did, with the date. When a task is done, I mark the ticket closed.
When the tub had first started leaking I had opened a ticket for it, basically a blank web page. Then whenever there was some new development on the tub, I added a date and a note — there was a cluster of notes from around the time I had been trying the silicone, noting what kind I had used and how long it had taken to cure. Then I had closed the ticket. Now I reopened it.
Why go to the trouble of a ticketing system for chores like this one? There are lots of reasons, and I hope to write more about this in the future. But today's an example is an unusually good one:
When I went to update the ticket with the new status, I saw that my previous attempt to fix the problem
(the one I thought hadn't worked)
had been in May 2025.
The silicone patch I had put on had solved the problem for sixteen months. I had had no idea that it had been so long ago.
That changed things completely. I had been thinking:
I put the silicone on, it worked for a while as a stopgap, but it soon failed and I need to come up with a different plan.
Wrong! With the new information, there was a completely different interpretation:
I put the silicone on, it took only twenty minutes, cost next to nothing, and worked for sixteen months.
The patch was not a failed workaround, not a short-term solution while I figured out the real solution. The silicone was the real solution! If all I need to do to keep the tub working is to smear goop on it every sixteen months, I don't need a better solution!
That date recorded in the work diary changed “it didn't work” into “problem solved”.
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