Sink or Swim in Plumber's bills? The Home Depot's plumbing aisle: a win for sure.

Julio Delgado from Somerville's Home Depot to the rescue . . .

I used to be the queen of do-it-yourself. I once was the only female shop hand building cabinets and counter tops in a southern New Hampshire kitchen cabinet shop. The experience was so life changing that I wrote a full length screenplay about it called "Sawdust." One day it will be a full length movie if I ever find the courage to start sending it out again to potential movie makers. In the mean time, my do-it-yourself handywoman identity has atrophied since those days. Now my tools are stuffed into into a small red cracked toolbox (I accidentally backed my car up over it and cracked its top). No longer do I have my router or my table saw. In fact I couldn't even find a pair of pliers to loosen the hoses of my leaking faucet.

Sometimes unattended home flaws live on like neglected fading houseplants with enough life in them that you still think they might recover but instead you end up tossing them out. My kitchen sink faucet started to die months ago. I didn't realize how ill it was. Finally, one day I found a puddle in the bottom of the sink base cabinet and the particle board had become swollen and warped. Out of practice as a do-it-yourselfer I called in a plumber who charged me $75 to tell me that my faucet was causing the problem. He told me I needed to buy a new one for at least $100, and that he'd install it for another $100. All too complicated and costly for my living-on-the-edge world so I put a bowl in the bottom of the cabinet to catch the leaky water. It worked, but then it created a great mystery: how could water accumulate in the bowl even when the faucet was off, when I had been away from the apartment for 12 hours? It had to be coming from another unit, I surmised, so I spent another $50 for the maintenance man to come out to tell me that the problem was coming from my faucet. I was out $125 and I still had the leak! Plus all the stuff I normally stored under the sink was out on the kitchen floor.

To make a long story longer, I went to the Home Depot in Somerville just to price a new faucet and was told by Co Store Manager Bryan McMakin that they would happily replace my leaking Kohler faucet with a brand new one if I brought in the old one! How cool is that? Next project was to get the faucet off the sink. Before he rushed back to NYC, my son was able to disconnect the hoses but couldn't get the faucet off the sink so he removed the sink with the faucet which I took the same day to the Home Depot. Bryan who was off duty had told his colleague Frew Gelahun, Assistant Manager, that I was coming in and that they should take good care of me which is exactly what he did when Frew put me in the hands of Julio Delgado who took out the old faucet and meticulously replaced it with a new one. In hard times when there's no extra money to pay the plumber to come and do everything, I was able to get the help I needed from Bryan and Frew and Julio. Now to reconnect! I called my local handyman Michael Buck who came by that afternoon to not only reconnect the sink, sealing everything against any further leakage, but also to replace a dimmer light switch that had not been working for 6 months. All that for another $50!

Thank you, Bryan and Frew and Julio for your outstanding customer service. Once everything was reconnected and running, it was as though my very own body had received a youth hormone. There's something about having my house seem to be falling apart that accentuates the fact that my body is slowly falling apart, too. Repairing the sink was like having an energy drink.