Weekends with Alfonso

At the end of last month, I started hanging with Handyman Alfonso. As I promised him, I was gonna help him with jobs for free during my newly found weekends off:

One of his clients has an old house, and needed a new lock installed on on of these old historic doors. Al had to take out the old lock, and then put a block of wood in there as the foundation for the new lock.

Before he could start cutting a hole, he had to shave off the wood with a chisel so that the door could close normally.

Going to that door job was kinda fun. I liked watching him do work and give him a hand. And it was cool doing a job for someone else. But since there isn’t much work on the weekends, we mostly did jobs at my properties. The first was replacing a thermocouple in Property 4’s water heater.

After turning the gas off, I used proper-sized wrenches to loosen the two conduits and the old thermocouple. Replacing it was very easy, and I can't believe all the times I had to pay Gonzalez $80 to replace one. The thing costs less than $10, and the job takes a total of about 20 minutes to complete.

Then we had a job at Property 2’s basement, where the washing machine continued backing up during the rinse cycle.

Once the water started coming out from the bottom, we smelled something that I immediately recognized. It was sewage, which meant that the sewer was most likely backed up, which explained a lot. I called the city to flush the drain, but haven't been back since.

Our final job was last week, back at Property 4’s water heater. The pilot went out after we installed the new thermocouple, so we decided to troubleshoot. We didn’t see any issues, so Al wanted to blow out the gas line. There may have been dirt in the line that prevented gas from getting to the pilot. But since he had injured himself cutting collard greens, I did it on my own under his instruction:

After loosening up the wires, I hooked up an air pump to the line that ignites the pilot and push whatever dirt may have been clogging it. It turned out there was no dirt, so we still don't know why the pilot goes out with the new thermocouple.

I won’t lie: taking that assembly apart and blowing out that line felt real good. I love making my own repairs, and doing it under Alfonso’s watchful eye made me feel safe. I want to do more but, as I said, he doesn’t have much work in the winter. And I have to be careful not to do this too much. My priorities are clear. And just in case my priorities lose clarity, here’s some help:

The doughnut that Al has to sit on in his truck for back relief... and possible hemorrhoids.

Alfonso is a mess, with multiple back surgeries and health issues. Just this week, he was supposed to do a job for me, but he woke up one morning with a numb right arm. He lives in a tiny house in a crappy neighborhood. Once the weather gets better, I'm expecting to do much more with Al on these weekends. His knowledge is very valuable and I like the guy, but I’d blow my brains out before I end up like him. Besides, I have enough health issues to deal with.