Plumbing

Friday by early evening, I finished the plumbing repair issue I mentioned in Thursday's post. What kept me from getting to a post last night was testing out the installation to make sure nothing leaked. No one was more surprised than I was that nothing leaked. 

An ironic thing here is that my right sidebar has a list of the most viewed posts of the last year, and for the last month or two, one of them has been a post about fixing my kitchen's water supply from August of '23. Not to be too redundant but I'm no plumber and of the various things I've had to do around the house, plumbing is my least favorite. Building bookshelves, or sets of shelves for books, magazines, whatever is much more interesting or fun for me.

In that article, I borrowed a quote that's sort of at the heart of the issue. Someone once told me that "there's nothing 3/4" about a 3/4" pipe," which is true but it's worse than that. There are multiple sizes of pipes or hoses and there are many different connectors for each one. You almost need to have done this sort of work to know how to do it. 

The problem I got finished with last night started out the weekend before Thanksgiving, November 23rd, and it was minor thing. The kind of thing you have to be affected with anal-retentiveness to even be aware of. In our bathroom (it's an old house and the old style 3 bedroom/ 2 bathroom) I noticed that the little screen on the bottom of the faucet - called an aerator - started squirting some water toward the base of the faucet. I've replaced those before and the procedure is to unscrew the old one and screw in a new one. I even had a cardboard piece from the package a new one had come in, so I knew what should fit (and note the builtin doubt that made me write "I knew what should fit" rather than I knew what would fit). It was 15/16" x 27.

Almost immediately, the threads on the old one sheared off and the threaded portion remained in the faucet's spout. I spent from the Monday before Thanksgiving until last Monday, 12/15 trying to get that out. I finally decided to just replace the faucet primarily because we don't remember when we put that faucet in, but it was probably around 1990. How much longer will it last? Will there be a bad valve next? Something else? We went with this one because its primary advantage is the spout is farther up and over the sink, making it easier to wash hands. 

Removal was pretty straightforward, but I made a newbie mistake that had me make another trip up to a hardware store. I assumed that the existing hoses would fit. It turned out they were around 1/2" too short to connect the faucet to the water supply, and a trip to the store yesterday led me to something like this. The original hoses were vinyl and cut with no slack whatsoever, and the replacement hardware making the connection a little farther from the house than where it had been attached is what led them to be too short. The new hoses had the opposite problem of being longer and having to be worked with to find a way to curl them up and put the faucet end where it needed to be. 

But the problem with working on stuff like this is access. It's all close to the back wall of the cabinet with the sink on top, and I'm too big to get in there comfortably. The best thing one can say about any task like this is that it's done. 

The Delta faucet we chose.