A Tale of Two Faucets

A look at the picture will probably tell you how I spent the morning. The bathroom faucet recently started leaking, and since I never liked that particular faucet anyway, I decided to replace it. I wanted a faucet with a single control for both hot and cold, and I did NOT want anything very shiny. Chrome should be saved for making optics on space telescopes and be left off of nearly everything else. So I found a fairly dull pewter instead.

The mechanics of taking out the old faucet and putting in the new one were fairly simple: (1) turn off the water valves to the sink; (2) disconnect the "popup" (the thing that pulls the drain closed); (3) loosen the bolts holding the old faucet to the sink and remove the old faucet; (4) put the new faucet in place and tighten its bolts; (5) reconnect the popup to the new sink; (6) connect water lines to new faucet. Sounds simple enough, except that this is all being done in a very small bathroom cabinet, and most of the bolts, etc, are between the sink and the back wall. Even worse, the bathroom cabinet has a divider between its two doors. So my access was through these two 9" x 17" openings. To get both hands in there to work, I had to thread my arms through first, then bring my head in and contort my shoulders. That or keep scraping elbows against the wood, which would have been annoying.

At any rate, I did manage to get everything taken out and then reconnected. I opted to keep using the old drain-blocker-assembly, largely because it wasn't obvious to me how to get it out. I've got the new one if anything goes wrong there. The worst part was the way it made my head feel. I'm not sure if there was some sort of fume under the sink that got to me or if it was just the fact that I'm mildly claustrophobic. Some of both, I suspect. I had to take frequent breaks, as spending too much time under the sink made my head feel like it was on thirteen-times-strength cough syrup, with a side order of nausea. I'm not exactly looking forward to replacing the kitchen faucet now (it's not leaking, but it's got its own problems), but at least there will be more room in that cabinet and larger access ports.

One more fun detail: the cold water turn off valve under the bathroom sink leaks. It doesn't seem to do it when it's actually turned on, but it dripped continuously while I had it shut off. On the bright side, those are fairly cheap AND can be seen from outside the cabinet.