The Hardest Part of Home Repair: Knowing the Part Name

The hardest part of home maintenance is knowing the names of things.

I see something in my house that needs fixing and I think “I need to replace the thingy behind the thing”.

 

So I try a web search and look for “thingy behind the thing” and no luck.  So I then go out into The Real World and find a helper at Home Depot.  But then my pride gets in the way when the always middle-aged guy says to know what I need, he first needs to understand how my fromter is connected to the wannuzit before he can figure out what my thingy is.  

I nod gravely feigning understanding the fromter since I don’t want to let on I am not versed in the masculine arts.  Telling him I use a 220 volt fromter (or 221 volt, whatever it takes), he waives me to a 100 yard isle filled with fromters, wannuzits and thingies that connect them, and sometimes I stumble on the solution, but usually not.

 

In the end I usually figure it out with a lot of YouTube, studying schematics, and often lucky guesses.  On the last go around I finally figured out the thingy was called an “escutcheon”