I finished the hanging baskets yesterday, so as soon as I get the Christmas lights off the porch (it’s been a long winter, people), the house will be officially decked out for spring.
Hopefully it’ll be dry enough tomorrow for me to climb out on the porch roof and get the lights down. Hopefully no one will shout across the street asking if I’m okay (as has happened twice before!). I am smaller and more agile than my husband, folks, with a lower center of gravity — of course I’m the one who deals with clambering around on the porch roof. I’m much less likely to fall off it than he is.
I can handle porch lights, but plumbing is my nemesis. We had a snip-and-drip system set up by a handyman for our hanging baskets, because I have a terrible tendency to forget to water the hanging baskets and then all the flowers die and it’s very very sad. Very. In theory, you hook this up to a hose with a timer, set it, and don’t have to think about it again for the rest of the season.
In practice, our faucet seems to send out just a little too much water force for this set-up as is, and we often end up with one of the hoses slipping out and gushing (rather than a nice steady drip). Which is frustrating. I’ve tried to repair it when that happens, but with limited success.
I think we’re now at a point where I can see two possible options. Option one, preferable, is to set up another set of snip-and-drip hoses to water the long railing planters below the hanging baskets, using a divider off the same faucet, so that each hose is getting half the force of the water, and maybe that will just fix the issue and I’ll also be less likely to have the railing plantings die from my careless watering habits.
Option two would be to just try to fix this again, maybe with tighter clamps? I’m not sure.
For either option, I think I’d really like someone with plumbing, or at least handyman skills who is confident in setting up this kind of system to come out and work on it for us, because as I said, plumbing is not my strength (nor Kevin’s). We once tried to replace a garbage disposal in the sink, and it took us four trips to Home Depot and hours of effort before we threw up our hands and admitted defeat, calling a professional. (In our defense, it took him two hours to install it, and said it was “a hard job”. That salved our egos slightly.)
We have a great plumber, actually, but he’s in high demand, and this is a tiny job for him, so it’s going to be hard to prioritize getting him out here. So if anyone knows someone who’d be good at installing snip-and-drip hose systems, I’d love recommendations. I’d want one for my vegetable beds too, and the hanging baskets on the back porch.
I think this could be a great side business for someone, setting up automatic snip-and-drip watering systems for folks in the area, because I can’t be the only person who would forget to water her head if it wasn’t screwed on….
