When my grandmother, an award-winning seamstress, asked how I was doing with the curtains I purchased for my living room, I told her “I just hung them up and they were the right length.”  In her typical dry manner she said “Oh, design by dumb luck.”

I apply this sentiment to my forays in plumbing.  Dumb luck was present when I put together the new fancy shmancy kitchen faucet.  I assembled all thirty pieces, but only after piecing together instructions in the faucet box with another set of instructions found on the Internet.  Dumb luck was also present when the sink pipes had to be reconfigured, since I had designed my counters to be 3” deeper than before.  After 10 days, that little leak near the p-trap gradually did clog itself, just as the man from Home Depot said it would.  But where was dumb luck when my dishwasher connection leaked?

Sometimes you just luck out.  Other times, your luck just runs out.