The don't make them like they used to.

So I was doing some work around the house over the Christmas vacation. We had an old laundry tub in the basement that was starting to leak. It wasn't just any old laundry tub. It was made of concrete! I tried to get the thing out of the basement on my own, but that wasn't happening.

This it what it looks like from the bottom when I am partway through smashing it into pieces.

Not only was it made of concrete it was reinforced with wire. It's not quite rebar, but it sure was hard to cut. I ended up having to go and buy myself a pair of bolt cutters in order to cut through it.

Once I finally got the thing broken up into pieces small enough to carry to my van I was able to get the laundry room back in order. It actually took less time for me to install the new laundry tub than it did to destroy the old one. Here's the new one:

It takes up less space and is securely bolted to the floor. Granted, it isn't as solid as the old one. It is made of plastic after all, but it will do the job just fine. What's more, when the time comes for it to be replaced or moved, it won't take a sledgehammer and blot cutters to get it out of the house.

Whenever I write about these projects around the house on this blog I try to tie them into education. Here is what I've been thinking since I finished this project.

I think our education system is like the old laundry tub. We built it strong and well. We built it to last. But it's got some leaks. It mostly works, and we can try to patch it. But at some point, it's going to have to go. Taking it out will be hard.

We need a new system, one that still does many of the same things in the same way. (The laundry tub is still a laundry tub, I even re-used most of the drain pipes for the same tub.) But it needs to be lighter, more flexible and adaptable so that when we need to make changes it won't be so hard. Because we are going to need to make lots of changes since we don't really know what comes next.