There! I fixed it!

[corrielle]

If you've ever been over to our house, you know that we are big coffee and tea drinkers.  In fact, we currently have a hefty store of Christmas flavored coffee just waiting to be used.  So, when I went to make some Wintry Blend on Monday night and all of the water started leaking out the bottom of the coffee maker, I was decidedly not pleased. I was ready to chuck the whole thing and get a new one, and I was about to head out to the dumpster behind our garage when a little piece of me said, "Stop.  Check the internet for an easy solution before you go buy a new appliance."  So, I did.  And I found out that one of two things had happened.  A.) The reservoir for the water had cracked, in which case there was nothing to be done. B.) A bit of rubber tubing had come loose and simply needed to be reattached. It seemed like the second thing was a fairly common problem, from the comments on the fix-it advice pages I found, so I decided to pull the "I can fix it!" routine.  This involved unscrewing the bottom of the coffee maker, which was harder than it sounds. First of all, the tool set we own has a ton of different bits of all different sizes, but the handle of the main tool is too short to fit into the hole where the phillips screws were. Second, there were two screws on the front that had star patterns on them, and I didn't have anything that would unscrew them.  The internet was helpful here, too. 

So, this afternoon, I finally had the time to go get a long-handled screwdriver and a star-pattern driver (thank you, Home Depot). I unscrewed the base pretty easily, and sure enough, there was a loose bit of rubber hose that I popped back on to the metal tube it had come off of.  I poured some water into the top of the coffee maker with the base still off, and there wasn't a single drop coming out where it wasn't supposed to.  I put all of the screws back in, ran a couple of cups of water through the whole cycle with no grounds just to be sure, and ta da!  It worked!

Guess who's drinking her Wintry Blend coffee and feeling capable and independent now!  That's right. Me. Because I fixed it.