One of the issues with dwelling the ecofrugal lifestyles is that small troubles, which most people might solve with a quick adventure to the shop, can effects become Projects. Here are a few examples which have popped up for us these days:
The Case of the Running Toilet
Our upstairs toilet has taken to running indefinitely when flushed. It doesn't do it all the time, but often enough to be annoying. It's not always the same problem, either; sometimes the chain has lodged itself under the flapper, preventing it from closing all the way, and sometimes the chain has grabbed onto the flapper itself, preventing it from falling into place. We've tried shortening the chain, but then it ends up being too short, so that the flapper can't close at all.
Now, a true spendthrift would solve this problem by calling a plumber, without even bothering to glean all this information about the flapper and the chain. A normal person would probably try fixing the chain once or twice and, when the problem kept happening, would go down to Home Depot and get a new flapper and chain for $5. But even that solution would involve spending some money, as well as throwing out the old flapper. And the thing is, we know the flapper we have used to work properly. So in theory, it should be possible to get it to work properly again. But getting it to work again will be a Project. It might involve cutting the chain, or replacing it entirely, or threading it through a soda straw as this Wikihow article suggests, or maybe shaving down the lip of the flapper so it doesn't catch. There will probably be some trial and error involved, and naturally, all of this will take time to do. So, like all Projects, it has to be set aside until we have several free hours to deal with it, most likely on a weekend. And in the meantime, we have to keep reaching in and fiddling with the chain every other time the toilet gets flushed.
The Case of the Broken Desk Fan
For the past severa summers, I've saved a touch clip-on fan on the brink of my table. I suppose we in the starting picked it up for a dollar at a backyard sale, and it is proved to be a profitable investment. It produces enough of a breeze to preserve me tolerably cool regardless of the indoor temperature as excessive as ninety stages, so I do now not want to switch on the air conditioning greater than a couple of times in a summer time. However, when I eliminated it from the table last fall, the clip broke. We tried gluing it again together, but no cube; the glue wasn't sturdy enough and it proper away break up. Then we attempted splinting it, and the clip simply broke in a extraordinary place. We concluded that the clip turn out to be not salvageable, however the fan nonetheless might be, if we must build some shape of stand for it. So now this damaged fan is now a Project, tucked on a shelf in our newly-wiped smooth-out workshop, watching for renovation at the way to require, yet again, a free weekend. Which I'm hoping we're going to have before the climate receives too warm, because of the truth obviously I can not certainly move right all the way down to the drugstore and spend $10 on a new fan if we've got were given an old one that might nevertheless do the pastime with most effective a bit little bit of work, right?
The Case of the Worn-Out Soles
As I've mentioned before on this blog, Brian has an old pair of shoes that were quite expensive when new, but have worn down to the point that there's little tread left on the soles. When I took them to the shoe shop to see if they could be resoled, I was informed that this type of sole costs $60 to replace (and even after shopping around online, I couldn't find anyplace that would do them for less than $50, which would come to over $60 with shipping). Given that we'd seen a similar pair of new shoes on sale at the Famous Footwear for $70, this didn't seem reasonable.
So, for a ordinary individual, the solution would be apparent: throw out the old footwear and each get a modern day pair or, due to the fact you have controlled without them this prolonged, simply maintain to do without them. But it appeared like a disgrace to me to throw out multiple shoes that still had a likely 12 months or two of life in the uppers certainly due to the fact the soles have been worn down. So I Googled
This story actually does have an ending, because last night I showed Brian the new soles and heels and asked for his advice. He examined them and concluded that they probably weren't suitable for the shoes he had, and also that it probably wasn't worth putting a lot of time and effort into a pair of shoes that had such an uncertain amount of life left in the uppers. But he did decide that the shoes were still wearable in their present condition—just not in wet weather. So he put the worn-out shoes in the spot next to his dresser where he keeps his everyday shoes, in the hope that he'll remember to wear them in fine weather and get whatever remaining life they have out of them. And the heels and half-soles went into a drawer with his shoe shine supplies, where we'll have them handy should we ever need to repair his 25-year-old dress shoes.
Now if only we could come up with equally satisfactory solutions for the desk fan and the toilet....
