take it apart
Leah gets up before me these days, and lately I've been acutely aware of when she's making her coffee because the kitchen sink hasn't been working quite perfectly: turning it on or off produces a noticeable "thunk" that pretty much shakes the whole house. Which is livable, but after it started dripping both from the end and the base of the faucet stem I figured I should do something about it (like, a week after... you know how it is). Happily, all I had to do to fix it was take the faucet apart and put it back together again, which I did the other day. Not only did the dripping stop, but now the faucet is a smoothly-function joy to use. I should have done that last month!
I wouldn't mention it here except just a couple days earlier I fixed the furnace the same way. The first really cold day this winter we were out all day, and when we came back the house just wouldn't warm up; when I went down to look at the furnace I knew why. Well, I sort of knew why: the proximate cause was the furnace's failure to light, but I had no idea of the reason for that. But I didn't let lack of knowledge stop me, and with headlamp and screwdriver got to work taking apart the little panel with the igniter and flame sensor. Not very much apart, since it was late, but enough to notice that maybe the connection between the igniter and its wire was a little loose. Who knows if that was the problem, but when I put everything back together it lit right up.
Our lives today are filled with things we don't understand, and it can be a little paralyzing. That's what attracts me to "sustainability" as a goal—not that I'm afraid society will collapse and I'll need to be able to grow my own food and maintain my own primitive machinery, just that I appreciate a little bit of comprehension about the workings around me. For me at least, it makes life less stressful.
Of course, I'm nowhere near complete independence in those terms, nor do I really hope to be. But at least now I have a first step for dealing with broken things that I'm not really sure how to fix: take em apart and take a look! It's kind of liberating.