Who'da thunk it? We shoulda...
May. 15th, 2008 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorchawenchWho would have thought that replacing the kitchen faucet could turn into such a huge mess.
I got a wild hair last month that I needed a swan neck kitchen faucet. We had a low slung 70's style faucet that barely cleared the sink itself. So today I went and bought a nice new HIGH faucet.
The faucet replacement went well enough. It's a pain in the butt to do, and this replacement lived up to the appropriate level of pain. And I love him dearly for giving me a faucet that will allow me to wash a mixing bowl without having to rearrange the entire sink full of dishes.
Then TMF, while under the sink, noticed that one of the drain pipes was wet. So he dried it. Had me run water.
Go on, guess what happened when water went through the pipes....
Yeah. So he takes apart the drains. 4 trips to the local hardware store and we find out that the previous owners, being the genius people they were....glued threaded PVC pipe. And glued the caps that connect the drains to the Y joint.
The whole point of making joints with PVC, threaded PVC, is so that you can get it off if something goes wrong and you need to replace it. You just don't glue threaded PVC when there's the remote chance that you might need to get it apart. You certainly don't glue the caps.
It took him the better part of 3 hours, fighting with the damn thing. Not only is this a threaded PVC joint, it's glued to another section of PVC. Which in most normal kitchens is where the steel pipes start.
We have no idea how far they used PVC pipes. Into the drywall behind the counter, for sure.
TMF ended up cutting the whole joint off. He's got a narrow lip of PVC to use when we get the replacement joint tomorrow. And yeah, he's going to glue it on. But he's NOT using threaded PVC. And he's not gluing the caps that connect the joint to the drains. There's the problem with our sink. Over-engineering.
Sometimes we run across these little house improvements that look like they were dreamed up by schizophrenic chimpanzees and implemented by squirrels on meth.
I got a wild hair last month that I needed a swan neck kitchen faucet. We had a low slung 70's style faucet that barely cleared the sink itself. So today I went and bought a nice new HIGH faucet.
The faucet replacement went well enough. It's a pain in the butt to do, and this replacement lived up to the appropriate level of pain. And I love him dearly for giving me a faucet that will allow me to wash a mixing bowl without having to rearrange the entire sink full of dishes.
Then TMF, while under the sink, noticed that one of the drain pipes was wet. So he dried it. Had me run water.
Go on, guess what happened when water went through the pipes....
Yeah. So he takes apart the drains. 4 trips to the local hardware store and we find out that the previous owners, being the genius people they were....glued threaded PVC pipe. And glued the caps that connect the drains to the Y joint.
The whole point of making joints with PVC, threaded PVC, is so that you can get it off if something goes wrong and you need to replace it. You just don't glue threaded PVC when there's the remote chance that you might need to get it apart. You certainly don't glue the caps.
It took him the better part of 3 hours, fighting with the damn thing. Not only is this a threaded PVC joint, it's glued to another section of PVC. Which in most normal kitchens is where the steel pipes start.
We have no idea how far they used PVC pipes. Into the drywall behind the counter, for sure.
TMF ended up cutting the whole joint off. He's got a narrow lip of PVC to use when we get the replacement joint tomorrow. And yeah, he's going to glue it on. But he's NOT using threaded PVC. And he's not gluing the caps that connect the joint to the drains. There's the problem with our sink. Over-engineering.
Sometimes we run across these little house improvements that look like they were dreamed up by schizophrenic chimpanzees and implemented by squirrels on meth.
