Solutions temporal; Duct Taping the Lusitania

That should buff right out.

As I awoke this morning and put the kettle on to perform my daily ablutions (I wash my hands in warm Earl Grey and sip from a carafe of diluted epsom salts) I took a moment to survey the daily arrangement that we manage around the stove:

It occured to me that there are a number of common and not-so-common stop-gaps that we've become well accustomed to managing and ignoring. I realized this because the third step in beginning my day (after the tea rinse and regurgitating the epsom) is to empty that blue bowl sitting next to the non working half of the stove. That bowl is a catch basin for the leaky pipe right above it - something we were very easily able to notice because the previous homeowners thoughtfully ran the plumbing on the outside of the finished surfaces in the kitchen. It's almost as if they knew that the sub standard plumbing work would fail and thus made it easy for us to diagnose the leaks! The fourth and fifth items in my morning ritual are to follow up with the other 2 plastic catch bowls in the utility closet - and empty as required. The green one catches a leak from the roof and the orange one services the over-functioning pressure relief valve of the worlds greatest craigslist deal. The color coding of the bowls helps so I just refer to an overflow as a 'code blue'.

It's not all drip management and esophageal enemas... stepping back, the stop-gaps or 'duck tape' solutions abound. Here's the washing machine draining into the kitchen sink...

That sink drains into another kitchen sink.

and a second floor window subdivided by bathroom that has remained since 2007. we gave up long ago and painted to match.

Add to that the growing number of unfinished painting projects and the handrail that won't stain itself and you've got the image of a lifestyle that's ripe for quick fix solutions peddled through DIY networks and networking DIY'ers.

Unfinished paint stares back with an un-blinking eye

And so these unfinished parts have come to symbolize our approach fairly well. We're willing to wait for the final solution. There's a patience (and cost) to doing things the right way balanced with a quick fix... I just hope the quick fix outlasts our patience -it's raining today and someone will need to manage the 'code green'.