ACKNOWLEDGE WHEN YOU KNOW YOU NEED TO HIRE A PROFESSIONAL

Recently my husband and I had issues with our plumbing and garbage disposal. As you might expect, it happened when the sink was seeing its heaviest use: our wedding, Dan’s surprise birthday party, and our seder, for example. We have gone to Home Depot and other stores numerous times and patched together the plumbing system again and again. In the short term it has worked out fine. However, if I added up all the money we spent buying parts, we could have hired a plumber and purchased a new garbage disposal! Why did we do it ourselves? Well, we thought we could tackle it on our own. It worked for awhile didn’t
it? We are the typical type A personalities we thrive on stress and love to have multiple projects, plus we love to do everything ourselves. Today, as I was cleaning out the refrigerator, I dumped something down the drain. In a normal garbage disposal it would have been fine. Instead, we have our “special” disposal. Can you guess what happened? Remember the Exorcist when the little girl “spit up” split pea soup? It was something like that.
The lessons learned are simple:
1. Specialized tasks require special knowledge. It’s OK to try and learn new things, but don’t do it yourself if you need it done right the first time.
2. Sometimes it’s cheaper to hire someone and get it right the first time.
3. If at first you don’t succeed, don’t get stubborn—get help!