The past few blogs have been about the company’s history, but I think we could all use a good laugh, so here’s a semi-funny for you instead.
They say crack kills. Crack can also lead to water damage.
It seems that many significant problems in life stem from negligence at the smallest degree. For athletes, it’s that little nagging pain in your foot that ends up needing surgery. For math students, it’s that simple algebraic mistake that they made an hour ago that prevents them from solving the problem correctly. For shower-takers, it’s that soft spot in the middle of the shower that will crack soon, and they won’t realize it.
That shower example was oddly specific; however, it comes from painful experience. My brother and I live in the second story of our home and we share one bathroom. To us, the home still feels new, even though we’ve lived here around 7 or 8 years now. From the day we moved in, the shower we share always had this small soft spot in the polyurethane of the tub that gave way to our weight ever so slightly. The rest of the tub was completely sturdy, but for that one spot, whose structural integrity was almost imperceptibly weaker than the rest of the tub. Caleb and I never thought more about it than that. Just a weird little thing that existed.
Now, I’m 20 years old and live in Tennessee during the school year, and I don’t shower at my house but for holidays and breaks… and global pandemics. When my school shut down for the rest of the semester due to Covid-19, I had no choice but to gather my things and move back to Illinois.
I remember getting home from Tennessee and going to the bathroom. I walked into the bathroom and happened to glance into the tub, and see this HUGE crack staring back at me. It was about as long across as a Post-it note and I knew exactly what it meant. I had to tell dad. Before I told anyone, I ran downstairs in a panic to check the ceiling beneath where the crack was to see if it had ruined the drywall. It hadn’t, praise the Lord.
With heavy heart, I told dad he needed to come upstairs and check something out. I watched him walk up the stairs, understanding that I would have to tell him that, for the past however many years, I stood in that spot and felt the weak structural integrity that one portion of tub had, admitting that I knew something was wrong and doing nothing about it. (My dad asked Caleb if he had noticed the Grand Canyon in our bathtub, and if it weren’t for Joaquin Phoenix’s rendition of the Joker this year, my brother would have won 2020’s Oscar for Best Actor. “Crack? What crack? Is there a crack in our tub? I’ve never noticed anything!” Bravo Caleb, bravo. I can accuse him of knowing about the crack because I know he’ll never read this blog!)
The repair was north of $600 but could’ve been so much more had there been damage to the drywall. This is my message to you, gentle reader, that if you think something might be wrong, it probably is, and you should see about getting it fixed. I might add that E.A. Knight Construction does some mighty fine repair work.
Happy repairing!
Austin Knight
