We replaced the kitchen faucet about a month ago. We went the whole route, had a plumber come in and do the job and everything.
Yesterday, I washed my hands at that faucet and turned the water off normally. No problem… A few minutes later, the other half turned on the same faucet and got only a trickle of water from both the hot and cold setting.
It looked like the water had been turned off. But the other faucets in the house were still working fine. Hmmm.
A bit more diagnostic work, a phone call or two, and it looked like the new faucet had something wrong with the cartridge. Cartridge? What cartridge? What is this, a printer?
A replacement cartridge was going to take an indeterminate length of time to obtain as this particular faucet wasn’t normally stocked at Lowes. We’d ordered the unit from Lowes but it had taken 5 weeks to get here. Doing the math, if they couldn’t get us an entire faucet in a timely fashion, who knows how long it would take them to get a part to us. Meaning that without the piece, we wouldn’t have a functioning kitchen sink for as long as it took them to get the part to us. This was clearly not gonna fly.
Okay… I make a run to Lowes and purchased a new 3x more expensive faucet from local stock. Now the problem was installation. I get home and open the box. reading through the instructions it doesn’t look too hard. Ahem!
I go get the tools, pull out the crap out from under the sink… (Don’t judge, you all have crap under your sinks.) then thread myself through the maze of dishwasher, garbage disposal, reverse osmosis, drain pipes, and hose connections for the existing faucet.
The goal I’m seeking is in the form of two small valves hidden in the far recesses of this labyrinth. The first of the valves I encounter is the Hot water inlet. I turn the valve easily to the off position. Further on in my journey, I find the Cold water inlet. It’s almost unreachable and is firmly locked in the “On” position and there isn’t enough room to get a tool into the space to turn it off. Attempting to turn it by hand does nothing but tear up my knuckles.
Ugh! The only option is to turn off the water to the entire house. Fine! I unthread myself and return to the real world of light and being able to stand up without having my back bent 90° the wrong direction. (The latter, took some time reminding me that I’m not as young as I used to be.) I tromp down stairs into the far reaches of the basement and turn off the main valve.
I tromp back upstairs to rethread myself under the sink. Part one of the replacement procedure is to unscrew the lines from the existing faucet from the inlets. Part one goes okay, dripping water everywhere of course. Part two is to reach up into the narrow space between the sink bowls to get a screwdriver into two small screws so that I can remove the bracket that will allow removal of the faucet assembly. RIGHT! To get the longest screwdriver and my hand into the space so that I can twist the screwdriver is a near Sisyphean task. Eventually, after much counting to 10 rather than letting my true thoughts on the matter be known to the entire neighborhood I’m successful.
Next comes the interminable unscrewing of the bracket down the mounting pipe. Job done and I’m ready to remove the weight and the retractable sprayer assembly that’s a simple two screw affair. The problem comes when I need to remove the hose loop. so that I can pull the whole assembly up through the top of the sink.
Yeah, the mounting hole in the top of the sink is too small to pull a looped hose and the feeder lines up through it. The looped hose has a disconnect on it that is completely non functional without some kind of special widget. I’m seriously thinking about just cutting the hose. I don’t want to do that because this is a one month old faucet and I’m returning the sucker.
I note that the hose is compressible and reason that if I can get one of the feed lines through the hole then I should be able to get the rest through. After some gentle persuasion, (Alright, you caught me. Brute Force!) The whole assembly pulls out and I dang near tossed it through the ceiling.
YEA! I take the new unit and drop its hoses and pipes through the hole and consult the installation guide. The gasket is still sitting in the box. Okay I should have consulted the manual a tad sooner, but better to have figured this out before I bolted everything into the sink.
I pull the hoses back out of the hole, put the gasket in place and thread it all down the hole again.
Now comes the hard part. Threading myself back through the labyrinth of pipes and crap to put the mounting plate and bolt onto the pipe that mounts the new faucet to the sink. The manufacturer does provide a nice tool for tightening the bolt in tight spaces. Mounting complete I’m patting myself on the back and thinking, “That was easy,” then happen to notice two things.
One, the fittings on the new faucet are female. So are the fittings on the hoses attached to the water inlets. Hmmm. This is a problem.
Two and more significant is that the fittings on the inlets are 1/2 inch and the fittings on the hoses to the new faucet are 3/8 inch. OH SHIT! This is why I hate plumbing. There are no standards. Why the hell are there no standards?
Time to head to the local hardware store to see if there is an adaptor to address this kind of issue. Grrrrr! The local guy at the hardware store is helpful and laughs with me, not at me, saying that this is why he hates plumbing too. He casually reaches to a hangar on the display next to him and pulls out a package that contains exactly the two parts I need. He smiles and says, “Happens all the time.”
$7 later I’m heading back home to complete this damn installation.
Old connections removed, new adapters installed. Sprayer hose threaded, weight attached, and I’m ready to turn the water back on. With fingers crossed I turn on the main and run back upstairs from the basement praying that there’s not water spraying all over the place.
God must’ve smiled on me. Everything was dry. New faucet installed! Whoo Hooo!
While I was at the local hardware store, UPS delivered part of the other half’s birthday present. A brand new iPhone SE 2. This gift is early, I decide to unbox it anyway because We’ve only got 14 days to decide if we’re going to keep it.
I’m not going to worry about setting this up tonight. I’ll save that “Fun” for tomorrow, A nice quiet Saturday morning.
The other half is seriously resistant to change. I’ll get up early tomorrow and set up a workspace with my Goal Zero battery pack on the dining room table. With it, I can provide power to the old iPhone and the new iPhone without having to be tied to a wall socket.
Then I’ll walk the other half through the setup process in a calm logical way where we can work without scrambling over each other to see screens.
Hopefully this will not result in a fight.
Pray for me…