June 30, 2008
A Software Engineer's Adventure in: Plumbing (2)
Anybody who's visited me in San Jose and used the downstairs bathroom in the past half a year would have noticed that the faucet is no longer held to the sink basin, but rather just supported by the pipes it's connected to. How ghetto.
The metal that held the faucet to the sink corroded after years of exposure to water, toothpaste, and whatever random chemicals I might have dumped there when I was a little boy with a chemistry set.
So I decided to fix that this past weekend.
I went to Home Depot and bought a $29 two-handle faucet thinking this couldn't be too hard seeing as I have changed the toilet's flush valve a while back without incident. (Hence, the "2" in the title.)
After doing the prep work, like pulling all the crap out from under the sink, grabbing all the tools, and turning off the water, I went under the sink disconnect the old faucet.
In 20 years, metal corrodes and rubber seals either expand or disintegrate. So to no surprise, it was hard to pull out the copper supply lines from each side of the valve. Tugging the cold line eventually got it disconnected. Tugging the hot line didn't seem to budge it at all.
In a brilliant move of Incredible Hulk-esque technique, I yanked the hot water supply line right out of the faucet....
....and snapped off the end connected to the supply valve at the same time. Lovely.
The cheap valves the original plumbers used were pretty crappy in that the supply line was solid copper as opposed to braided flex lines. So they're hard to bend. And they were connected directly to the valve, so when somebody* snaps them off the valve, you gotta replace the whole valve. Oh, and the cold one was leaking when you try to shut it off, so I needed to replace it too.
About $25 later, I got myself some new valves and supply lines.
And another hour later, my new faucet.
