My husband fixes things and saves us tons of money, thanks to his carpenter dad's training. Last week, I opened the cupboard below the sink and discovered the pressed-wood flooring in there was completely soaked through, and smelling terrible. Our water filter had a slow leak and had been silently flooding the floor for a long time!

Jay spent 2 days hacking the cabinet floor out, chunk by chunk. The above picture shows him figuring out how to make a replacement floor. I love pictures of him like this (of course, I love HIM!). He is methodical and accurate, and approaches things like the engineer he is. He suggested we leave it open to the concrete sub-flooring, giving us several more inches of height for storage. It looked like a good idea.

This is what it looked like when he got it cleaned out:



Then he painted the floor and put a shelf in (to the left):


Here's the new water filter -- the old one lasted more than 25 years, so we got our money out of it, and this one was purchased several years ago, so it was ready to install. Note we now have an aluminum pie tin underneath it, to monitor for leaks this time.


At my request, he also added a shelf for storage of things used infrequently. We checked the height to make sure our normal LOC quarts would go on there, and it turned out to be the perfect height for paper towels as well.





The last things to go in were the Container Store "buckets" to store all the other stuff we needed down there. Voila!

Fixing mundane household break-downs... seemingly minor .... but such a valuable skill my husband possesses. Our kitchen was in a mess for almost a week as we waited for things under the sink to be completely dry. Washing dishes and preparing meals complicated the days, not to mention coping with the mental clutter that messy kitchens give me, but the sense of accomplishment triumphed.


Oh, did you think I was going to show it with ALL the junk back in there? Mwah ha ha ha ha!