A few weeks ago my shower developed an annoying leak. Every time I got out of the shower, I'd see a big puddle of water on the bathroom floor in spite of the shower curtain supposedly being in the way.

This is the first serious homeowning problem which I've been able to solve without calling in a professional. However, none of the process was fun, not even the end of it. The stages I went through were as follows:

Denial

This went through the sub-stages of ‘I must just have not been careful enough with the shower curtain’ (not supported by the evidence), ‘perhaps it was a one-off oddity’ (not borne out by subsequent events) and the desperately hopeful ‘perhaps I'm imagining it’ (uh-uh).

Frustration

Having decided there really was a problem and I really had to do something about it, I began systematic investigation. (I hadn't ruled out calling in a plumber at this point, but I wanted to do some diagnosis myself first so I'd know if I needed one and so I'd have something to tell one if I did.)

This was a very annoying phase, because the leak turned out to be a heisenbug: whenever I actually got bodily into the shower with the intention of getting clean, it leaked, but whenever I ran the shower with the intention of testing it to debug the leak, it didn't.

I eventually resorted to dusting cornflour over various surfaces in order to see whether it got washed away by rivulets of water; even that didn't actually reveal the problem, but it did permit me to rule out all the places I'd dusted cornflour and eventually isolate the problem to some non-watertight sealant. (Water had only been running down on to that sealant as a result of bouncing off my body, and not when the shower was unoccupied – hence the heisenbug. Once I'd realised that, I was able to reproduce the leak reliably in testing by pointing the shower head directly at the culprit.)

Incompetence

Having tracked down the problem and determined that it didn't involve anything (a) complicated, (b) unfixable without specialist plumbing tools or (c) buried behind the wall panels or under the bath, it now seemed a simple matter to fix it. So I went to B&Q and bought a bottle of bathroom sealant; then I came home, scraped away as much of the defunct sealant as I could get off with a Stanley knife, and got to work.

First lesson: read the instructions carefully before leaving the shop, and certainly before starting to actually do anything. I got the bottle home and looked at the back. ‘Step 1: cut off the nozzle in the following way.’ Fine, did that. ‘Step 2: load the cartridge into your sealant gun.’ … Ah.

Well, I thought, how important can a sealant gun be? There's goo in the bottle, which I want to be on the bath instead, and the bottle's got a nozzle. I can just squeeze it, right?

… wrong. It turns out that the bottom of the bottle is detachable and intended to be gradually pushed upwards by the sealant gun mechanism to squeeze the goo out of the nozzle at the top. So when I squeezed the bottle in the middle, I got a small amount of goo out of the nozzle and then the bottom came off the bottle messily. (But not too messily; sealant is sticky and viscous stuff and didn't actually go everywhere.)

So I tidied that up, and then tried pushing the bottom of the bottle upwards manually with my thumbs, which worked for a few inches until my thumbs started to hurt too much. Found a piece of wood to use instead, and that sufficed to apply the rest of the sealant – leaving only the problem that the resulting seal was wobbly, too thick, and downright looks as if it was applied by somebody pushing a piece of wood into a bottle against great resistance and with his hands shaking from the exertion. Still, it looked as if it ought to be watertight at least, which is surely the most important thing.

Embarrassment

That evening, I went to the pub and recounted some of this to what I hoped would be a sympathetic group of friends. A couple of people looked at me in absolute astonishment at the idea that I could possibly not have known sealant was applied using a sealant gun. ‘Well, surely you must have seen someone doing it before?’ I was asked. ‘Your parents, for example?’

Well, no, actually; bathrooms don't need sealing very often, and although it's probable that my dad did do it once or twice while I was around, I either didn't know he was doing it at the time or wasn't particularly interested in watching him do it when I could have been (for example) playing computer games. This didn't strike me as remotely unreasonable, and still doesn't.

They also told me there were special sealant-remover products which I could and should have used in place of my Stanley knife. Ho hum.

Suspense

The back of the sealant bottle also said that it would take days to dry, and should be ventilated in the process. So I left it well alone for days on end, keeping the bathroom window open as much as possible when I was in, and going in to work early to use the shower there when necessary.

Anticlimax

This morning I took my first actual shower-with-intent-to-wash in the repaired bathroom. It was a very pleasant shower, made all the more so by having gone without one for a couple of weeks. When I got out of the shower, I checked the area where the leak puddle had previously collected, hoping this time that it would be bone dry.

It wasn't. There was just a tiny wet patch, as of about ten drops of water having dribbled out where there had previously been a river.

I think I'm going to have to call that an acceptable imperfection, not least because tracking down ten drops would be a hell of a job compared to tracking down an entire impossible-to-miss deluge. But it's just imperfect enough to spoil what would otherwise have been the warm satisfied glow of a problem thoroughly (if not actually competently) solved.

Bah.