Hold up, you guys are making wool sound like some magic fabric. My mom's old wool sweater shrunk down to doll size in one wash, and it was never the same. Riverp37, that blanket might be "fine" but I bet it's scratchy as heck and full of moth holes by now. Newer blends just work better for actual use.

Oh man, the dollar store plumbing aisle is basically a "how to flood your kitchen" starter kit.

Phoenix in July with no AC sounds like a personal preview of hell. I guess that warranty company figured a new unit was cheaper than a lawsuit when you melted into a puddle on your own floor. My warranty fought me for three weeks over a broken dishwasher, so you basically won the home owner lottery. Hold onto that company name, because that kind of luck is not normal.

That bit about the handle snapping off a $700 prop is so real. My friend had a similar disaster with a fancy metal replica on a student film. The actor fumbled it during a chase scene and it put a huge dent in a concrete step, which looked more like a prop failure than a story beat. They ended up using a painted airsoft gun for the rest of the shoot and you couldn't tell the difference on the final cut. It definitely made me see the value in having something you can just replace without a huge cost or panic.

Oh man, I feel this so hard. I tried the same thing with an old truck, thinking I was being smart. Spent a whole weekend just trying to get one decent starter off, only to have it fail a month later. All that greasy, frustrating work for basically nothing. Sometimes the cheap way out ends up being the most expensive when you count your time and sanity.