Happy Accidents

“We don’t make mistakes here, we just have happy accidents.” – Bob Ross

Ever wonder why plumbers’ pants are always falling down when they’re crawling around under your sink?  Because that is the LAST thing on their mind.  At a certain point, you could care less how you look, whether your dignity might be in question, or who might be staring in utter disgust at your backside. Your back hurts, you can’t see a thing, it’s too cramped to even use your tools properly, and just when you think you’ve finally got it – you crank the water back on and drip…drip.  Sigh…

I don’t know how they do it.  I actually pity the profession.

My attempt to replace the faucet in the kitchen went about as swimmingly as you read above.  I worked on it for multiple nights, several hours of my life spent under that sink, and the darn thing STILL drips.  I actually think I’ve only managed to make it worse now.

The existing fixture just wasn’t working for me.  Beyond just being old and having an annoying amount of knobs (yes 2 is too many – I’m a single-handle gal) and making the most God-awful old pipe moan when it was running, it wasn’t the right size for the sink.  I have a very shallow sink basin which requires a hi-arcing faucet in order to fit most of my pots under it to fill them.

If it’d had a separate sprayer, I could have dealt with it, but it didn’t.  And after about a month of filling up my big soup pot by pouring baby pot-fulls of water into it, I bought this one from Walmart since it was almost the exact same fixture I’d had at the old rowhouse in the city and loved. Sure it was a little pricey, but it came with the benefit of familiarity… and a schnazzy pull-out spray hose.

Installation seemed simple enough.  I’d watched about a dozen how-to videos on YouTube and Home Depot and armed with the proper tools, on loan from a helpful coworker, got to work.  While removing the old fixture, I noticed the old washers were completely rusted and corroded.  I’d wanted to save the old parts to re-install it when I left or to re-install if the new one was a total flop.  Unfortunately, it just wasn’t salvageable.  I mean they literally crumbled as I was removing them.  It was gross.  But my problems didn’t end there.  The basics were simple, but the troubleshooting was a real pain.

Once I turned the water back on, there was a slow drip coming from somewhere up where the spray hose was attached and while banging around in that tiny space trying to fix that leak, I created a new leak in the hot water hose.  So now I had dripping coming from two places.  After a couple of days of only making things worse for myself and having to empty the now two buckets under my sink on a regular basis, I finally caved and submitted a work order with my apartment complex in the hope of having someone who knew more than I did fix it for me.  And sure enough bright an early the day after New Year, the maintenance man arrived and made it all better.

Want to know what the initial problem was?  I’d missed the fact that a little rubber washer had been twist-tied to the spray hose that I was supposed to use when I screwed that to the main hose.  OOPS.  I’m happy to say now though I have a fully working kitchen faucet and no leaks.  Lessons learned?  Leave the plumbing to a pro.