It had been going on for nearly a year, Jennifer told me: the drip in the hall bathroom faucet which had, by the time I started moving in, turned into a steady stream of water. Because the water in the city we live in is so hard, this steady stream had resulted in the basin of the sink becoming encrusted with gritty green hardwater crud. It also provided an alternate source of drinking water for the cats; for some reason, cats seem to prefer toilets or stagnant water in sink to their regular drinking bowls. Then, once they’ve imbibed of the sink, the cats like to come up to their humans and nuzzle them for attention.

So, recently, Jennifer decided that it was time to do something about this leak. To that end, on Sunday afternoon, after we moved four crates of books and some furniture from my house to her house, we stopped at the hardware store and bought a new faucet and some plumber’s putty, and set out to repair her leaky faucet — after another stop by my old house, where I was pretty sure I had a pipe wrench and some other tools that would be useful.

We started with some confusion about where, exactly, the water needed to be turned off at: at the valves under the sink? We tried that, but it didn’t seem to work out. Jennifer made a call to her father, who kindly informed us, with a minimum of patronization, that we should turn the water to the house off at the main valve in front of the house. We fussed a bit with some different pipes until we finally found the main, and shut it off. Then Jennifer crawled underneath the sink and disconnected the pipes to the faucet. At that point, she decided that I needed to take over.

So there I was, on my back, under the sink, in the little cupboard, working a wrench into a strange angle to reach the bolts that were not really meant to be undone by any human being, getting myself splashed by water that was still in the pipes in spite of the main having been shut off, Jennifer laughing the whole while. Okay, yes, it was fun. Jennifer and I joked at each other about how nauseatingly domestic the entire situation was, and how it was good practice for when we move into our house in Dixon. Jennifer even asked me if I was enjoying performing my "husbandly duties".

We fixed the faucet. It stopped leaking, and we turned the water main back on. Jennifer took a butter knife and used it as a chisel to get rid of the hardwater crud that had encrusted the sink. The cats had to revert back to their own water bowls and the occasional open toilet for drinking water. And the annoying leak that had been keeping Jennifer awake at night had finally stopped.

I had never done any sort of home maintenance task quite like that. Having lived in rentals all my life, it has been far too easy for me to simply call up the landlord and say, "Can you replace the roof?" or "The pilot light needs to be lit." But when Jennifer and I move into our custom-made home, there will be no landlord that we will be able to call upon to make these repairs. It will be just the two of us facing those challenges together.

And, honestly, I’m looking forward to those challenges. Jennifer says that if she has faith in anything, it’s in us. I feel exactly the same.

After we finished with the sink, we walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner, still joking about the domesticity of it all. I squeezed her hand as we walked, and teasingly asked her how married she felt at that moment. She squeezed my hand back and replied, "Very. Very married."

Eleven months to go. But who’s counting?