No leaks
I'm feeling awfully pleased with myself just now. I replaced the faucet in our upstairs bathroom.
I can take apart a computer and put it back together again with absolutely no qualms, but get me to a Home Depot and I'm a duddering idiot. I'm certainly no home handyman; I'd just as soon pay a professional. That way I have someone else to blame if the job gets screwed up.
Shortly after we moved in we got a plumber out to change the faucet in the kids' bathroom downstairs. It was a brass fixture that looked horrible and was falling apart; probably original equipment that came with the house, which was built in the late 1980's. The fixture in the upstairs bathroom has been serviceable until earlier this year, when the plastic handles -- those wretched-looking ones that are supposed to approximate faceted crystal or glass -- literally dissolved, breaking into pieces. It's a cheap no-name fixture, so I bought replacements that approximated the originals, but they never worked right.
Earlier this week I discovered that the faucet itself was leaking profusely, causing a backflow of water down the back of the pipe and into the cabinet underneath. Bonnie lost some cosmetics and assorted toiletries to the watery carnage, but it could have been much worse, obviously. I turned the shutoffs underneath the sink to prevent a flood. Bonnie and I finally made it to Home Depot today.
Last Christmas I got a gift card to Home Depot. It had been given to me for a specific purpose -- an outdoor container to hold my trash cans, to prevent the damnable raccoons from spreading garbage all over my porch, as they do this time of year. Alas, the unit I had my heart set on was well outside the limit of the card, so I decided to save up and come back at a later date. But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and I soon found myself in need of sundries best bought at hardware stores, so I've whittled the card down bit by bit in the intervening months. I still had a sizeable amount left on the card, however, and used it up this afternoon.
We priced out some faucets and discovered that, as usual, our tastes greatly exceeded our budget. The faucets we wanted were in some cases two or three times the price as the one we ultimately decided on. Interestingly, outside of an unusual finish or an embellishment or two, we really couldn't figure out what made the more expensive units worth the money.
Glacier Bay is a budget-priced brand that Home Depot seems to sell a lot of, and they had a serviceable model we liked, complete with french-style handles to give our new bathroom fixture a bit of character. It was inexpensive enough that we picked up a few other parts and items that we needed.
I'd intended to replace the faucet tomorrow -- I'm big on procrastinating. But curiosity got the better of me, and I cracked open the box and started poring through the instructions over Big Brother 5 tonight. It didn't look too bad, so I started the installation after Big Brother wrapped up at 10. I figured if worse came to worst I could just stop and start again tomorrow. But as it turns out, I was done in time for the news, with no leaks!