Only one thing happened on Sunday. I replaced our bathroom’s faucet. that’s it. That’s everything. At about 10am I started work on it by shutting off the water to the bathroom. Then I had to clean everything out from under the sink. When I got to removing the existing faucet I realized I would probably want my basin wrench but I couldn’t find it. I spent some time trying to get along without it. Eventually I decided to start looking for it. 15 minutes later I threw in the towel and announced I was going to the hardware store to buy a new one. 45 minutes later I returned with a (crappy) basin wrench, “goof-off”, 50lb of salt and a new flashlight.

With the new (crappy) basin wrench I was able to remove the bolts under the sunk and pull out the existing ugly faucet. It was in lousy shape and virtually disintegrated in my hands. Because of how the drain had been installed I couldn’t UN-install it without a hack-saw. So I had to find my hack-saw. That didn’t go badly and in short order I had the drain in several pieces.

I installed the new faucet and screwed on the braided pipe that connects the cut-off valves with the sink. I spent a while trying to get the drain right and I wound up having to pull off the drain-trap assembly from the wall. HOLY COW WAS THERE SOME FOUL SMELLING GUNK IN THERE!! I nearly vomited. In fact I gagged several times. It was only my excellent constitution that kept my lunch down.

Eventually I got everything connected and it was time to test it out. Liz was starting to get a little frustrated because all this had taken so long. I ran downstairs and turned the cold water on.

DISASTER! Water sprayed everywhere underneath the basin! Same thing with the hot water. Oh, and the shut-off valves didn’t work — they were stuck, so I had to do all the starting/stopping from two floors below. I spent the next few hours trying different things but nothing seemed to work. We started to suspect the workmanship of the faucet. By 3pm I was VERY frustrated and took Chloe with me to Home Depot to get a new faucet. While we were there I grabbed another pair of braided pipe-tube-things — just in case I damaged my existing ones while I was trying to tighten the bolts on it.

By 4pm I was home again and Liz and I got the new faucet installed in short order — it was only about 15 minutes. We tried it out and fired up the water and … DISASTER! It sprayed water all over again! I was dismayed but hauled my very sore butt back upstairs to take another look. I decided that we would try putting the new braided pipe-tubes-things in. Liz asked if they were supposed to have washers in them. I think I said “well, duh! of course!” She pointed out to Mr. Smarty-Pants (me) that the old braided pipe-tube-things were lacking washers!! We got a look at the crappy old faucet and discovered that the washers had seamlessly welded themselves to the faucet!!

Outstanding!! We had discovered the problem!! And I had replacement parts!!

But the replacement parts were 20″ and the distance to be covered was 22″.

<*sigh*>

So I hoofed it back to Home Depot and found some parts that would do the trick. By 6:30pm I had returned home and put the new parts in and everything worked great!

My only regret is that I wasted ALL of a perfectly good Sunday on this. It was all day. Awful.

But we have a pretty new faucet!

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