Letting it Sink in

A story about learning the trades.

I don’t know why I thought I could bang out a quick faucet repair in about a half an hour but here was my delusional self under our bathroom vanity sink with a shopping list of problems staring back at me:

Photo by Chastity Cortijo on Unsplash

1. Cold water handle is tight.

2. The handle is tight so when you pull on it - the entire faucet assembly moves.

3. While turning off water to try and fix the above two I noticed that there’s a leak.

Oh. Good.

The first business at hand was to try and get that leak to stop and with a bit of frantic searching at YouTube University I found a solution that should work before the water got ankle deep, and thankfully it did.

I’m on a roll now. “I’ve got this”, I say to myself.

I don’t “have” this, or anything at all - as now the entire vanity has been unscrewed from the wall and I’ve got pipes off and hoo boy - it’s not good. not good.

Also, wet.

But at least I stopped the leak, so progress.

Up next: why the heck is the cold handle so hard to turn? Again I attend my favorite school and learn that if you take a hex wrench and unscrew the little bolt at the back of the faucet then you can remove the handle and clean or replace as needed.

The little hex screw was stripped. There’s about 2 inches from the back of the faucet to the wall so there’s not a lot of room to work back there. The internet told me to use an elastic band. Spoiler: the elastic band did not work

The internet also told me to drill it out or use some voodoo like baking soda and superglue but I could envision myself covered in baking soda and superglued to the vanity so I decided against that option.

The thing that worked was to hammer in a torx screwdriver and turn and lo and behold the screw came right out.

But this led to more disappointment as the internet told me that I could take the entire handle apart and clean it as the reason it wasn’t working was probably just mineral buildup and a good disassemble and clean would have us good as new.

Trouble is, we bought the the model with no hope of disassembly and so I did the next big thing and sprayed a few dollars of WD-40 in every crevice I could find and then turned and turned and turned and finally things loosened up enough so I could put it back again and tighten that set screw.

The last problem was the entire faucet assembly was loose and so it would actually move if you went to turn on or off the water. Not good. If I had to guess, the tiny little hands of destruction were to blame because this vanity has been fine until she showed up and is now washing and brushing on her own.

Once again - a thing that should be easy is not. I had ideas of quickly reaching under the sink and tightening a nut and ta-da!. There was no ta-da, because the design of the sink makes it close to impossible to get your hand anywhere near that little plastic nut.

But after some swearing and arm contorations, I managed to get this thing tight against the furnace

All that was needed was to get the pipes and drains connected and that was the easy part and everything buttoned back together without problem.

As I write this, we have a clean and working sink that cost us nothing for the repair other than my efforts. I have no idea if this repair will last longer than the time it took for you to read this, but if it doesn’t I have a backup plan:

I’ll get out the baking soda and superglue.

Learning the trades one day at a time,

TH and Co.