I Suck At Plumbing

It only took about four years or so, but I can now cross off that one plumbing project from my to-do list. Yes, I suck at plumbing.

When Karen and I added a second floor to our house, the contractors installed a generic basic faucet in the second bathroom. Interestingly enough, we had a faucet already planned for the second bathroom. Back when the house was a shanty (although who am I kidding... the house is still a shanty), Karen and I purchased a contractor pack of faucets. The pack consisted of two faucets that we had planned to use at the time for our downstairs bathroom and our master bathroom.

Like most of my home improvement projects, at the time I only completed one of the tasks: the downstairs bathroom. I have since had to install the faucet again in the downstairs bathroom when we renovated that, but that is another story. (The bathroom had this god awful ugly green tub and water damage galore before the renovation.)

Anyway, with the second floor renovation, we decided to use the other faucet for the second bathroom as opposed to the master bathroom. The only problem: we forgot to give the other faucet to the contractors when they were hooking up the sink in the second bathroom.

And rather than have the contractors switch it back out, we decided that I would just make the switch at a later point in time. Who knew that later point in time would be over four years?

Anyway, I was able to switch out the faucets thanks in part to my parents who came down to take our twenty month old daughter (Briana) out to the mall. With Briana out of the house, that meant I had more time to dedicate to the home improvement project.

At first, things weren't looking too good for me. After I had removed the generic faucet and installed the desired faucet, I turned on the water. Everything was good, except that the water would not stop coming out of the cold water side of the faucet. So, I had to take apart the valve to see what was up. Turns out, the rubber washer was misaligned.

A few minutes later, voila! The water stopped when I twisted the faucet handle. The only problem: I had the open and the close reversed within the valve. So, I had to take apart the valve again and reset it correctly. Needless to say, I got the faucet to properly work.

Interestingly enough, after my initial gaffe, I immediately thought about my BFF (Kerry). The faucet in Kerry's bathroom is reversed in that you have to turn the handle in the opposite direction of what one would normally expect. It occurred to me that the reason for that may be the same thing I had just experienced.

Anyway, it felt pretty good to finally cross something off of the to-do list. Following my plumbing project, I made a brief visit to Karen's grandmother who lives in Hanover. I was explicitly asked by Karen's grandmother to help her with some technical issues. The technical issues involved cable television and the computer. Specifically, the issues were to switch out the cable box with a new one and figure out why she could not open an attached document in her email. Needless to say, the technical issues were resolved. Thank you OpenOffice.