Column: Curing my boredom with a project can have side effects

I don’t do “nothing” very well. I get crabby when I don’t have some kind of project to do. Every morning I spend some quiet time as I watch the bees busy at the flowers and the birds emptying the feeders and I am soon inspired to get going myself.

My helpmate is a veritable font of project ideas. Seeing me moping around one morning, she cheerfully suggested a short list of desired home improvements. “You know, every year we say we (meaning me) should make an outdoor shower. How about it?”

When I was a kid my family would schlep from Glen Rock to Beach Haven, New Jersey for a week or two at a beach house at the shore. Being a beach house, of course, it had an outdoor shower and all of us little kids thought it was very special to take a shower outside.

Now, we don’t have a beach house, but the beach is pretty dang close. I thought about rinsing off the vinegar after a close encounter of the jellyfish kind, outside, smelling the flowers and feeling the breeze. I flashed back to Beach Haven, and childhood.

An outdoor shower it would be.

Now as previously noted in this space, all of my home improvement projects are carefully calculated to include roughly 60 trips to the hardware store. The reason for this is because I can never seem to find the exact tool or supply that I need, even though I know that deep in a box in the basement or buried in a drawer or in a gigantic pile on my so-called “work bench” I will find that crescent wrench or fitting.

To mitigate this possibility, I decided to perform an unprecedented organization of all my tools and supplies. Complicating this process was the fact that I had recently inherited a whole bunch of hand tools from my Dad and they were sitting in a galvanized pail. It took two full days. I unmercifully purged entire drawers of stuff I hadn’t used for years and would never use again. Most of it went to the dump, either to the construction and demolition pile or the Goodie Table. In the end, I found five crescent wrenches and at least two of every other tool known to man.

I am forever grateful to all the people in the Shelter Island construction community who put up with my ineptitude in order for me to learn the basics of demolition and building during the winter months when I wasn’t cooking. I am also equally grateful to Emil Johnson, who, in his own inimitable way, taught me the basic rudiments of plumbing and electrical work.

Ripping out the window was easy and fun. A Sawzall is by far one of the most manly tools you can use. Re-studding, sheathing and shingling the hole also went really well, thanks to all the necessary tools and nails I uncovered in the shop purge. Things started to slow down when it came to cutting in and sweating the pipes to supply the shower. I know of no other task that so relies on perfect preparation in order to have a successful result. Grit cloth and/or steel wool is used to polish the copper, and then “flux” to encourage the solder down into the joint heated by my favorite tool, the blowtorch, which, as I found out, can set 140-year-old wood on fire in seconds.

Hopefully when you’re all done and you turn on the water it doesn’t come fizzing out of leaky joints or, worse, result in a joint completely letting go, sending scalding water into your face or shooting across the basement as you scramble to shut off the water main.

After drilling the holes and connecting all the pipes came the moment of truth. I turned on the ball valves and waited for the sound of fizzing water. Nothing! I went outside and looked at my handiwork, as did helpmate. “Isn’t that a drip coming from the handle?”

To my dismay, while all my sweat fittings had held, the threaded fittings were seeping water. By replacing the Teflon tape or, in my case, applying the aptly named “pipe dope,” several disassembles and reassembles finally resulted in a drip-free application.

Late that afternoon I was the first to try it. Here I was outside my house, ready to rinse off from the beach in our very own outdoor shower. The breeze was blowing, the birds were singing, the bees were buzzing. Memories of Beach Haven came flooding back as I turned on the cold tap, sending out a nicely pressured stream of HOT water. “Pipe dope” had failed to realize that when working from behind a shower the hot water should be connected to the right side and the cold water to the left, and not the other way around.

What’s next on the list?