Yesterday I had two DIY victories. One was repairing a bathroom sink that wouldn’t hold water when the stopper was in place. Turns out it was easily fixed by undoing the nut underneath, lifting the drain piece up, removing the disgusting plumber’s putty that had started to disintegrate, putting a generous amount of fresh putty around the drain, and reattaching the whole thing.

The other repair success was a burner on our Maytag MGS5770 gas stove that was sometimes difficult to light. A repair person who fixed something else on the stove a few years ago said the whole burner would have to be replaced, at a cost of $50-$75 for the part plus a $75 service call, but it wasn’t bad enough to bother with that expense and faff.

My list of home repair projects has benefited from the latest pandemic advice to stay at home, which we have been doing since before Christmas anyway, so I decided to tackle this burner. When cleaning the burner holes didn’t improve anything, I examined one of the other burners and observed how the spark from the electrode lit the gas coming out of a hole directly under it. On the faulty burner, that electrode was ever so slightly twisted, perhaps a couple of millimetres off, so I took a pair of pliers and gently twisted the electrode so it pointed directly down over that hole. It worked perfectly, and now the burner lights immediately and much more safely.

As these little niggling projects had simmered away in the background for years, they weren’t obviously going to massively change our lives, but the small victories were satisfying and very much felt like putting things in order in a disordered world.