My kitchen sink is a cast iron monstrosity with porcelain veneer - sink in the middle with two large dish drainers on each side. Someone with a large farmhouse and luxurious kitchen would appreciate it's antique charm and maybe pay top dollar. Someone with a 10x10 kitchen...not so much. The faucet itself emerges not from the counter top but from the wall...Cute? Maybe. Impossible to replace? Definitely.
The hot water knob fell off about six months ago and after trying unsuccessfully to replace it, a pair of pliers have been the only way to use the hot water. Considering I don't have a dishwasher, the hot water gets a lot of use and this delightful "fix" only worked for so long.
So I bit the bullet and went online to find a decorative, wall-mount faucet that worked with my kitchen and didn't cost an arm and a leg. Yeah! Alright, I can do this. The box arrived a week later and like a kid at Christmas, I excitedly tore the box open. It's shiny, and new, and chic.....and oh crap, it has a LOT of pieces.
Back to youtube.com I went to find a video on replacing a faucet. Seemed pretty simple. No problem.
Step 1: Turn off the water. In many older houses, you may not find a cut-off near the faucet itself like you'll find in the bathroom. Being a smarty-pants, I knew that meant I'd have to turn it off to the whole house. Found the cut-off buried behind my washing machine in the basement and turned it off. DIY Girl Note: Use the bathroom before you do this.
Step 2: Turn on the faucet to drain the water.
Step 3: Using a wrench, begin to remove the old faucet from the pipes. When I did this, I realized that the pipes were terribly rusted. The elbow that connected the faucet to the vertical pipes coming behind the sink came off in my hands and there was no hope of reconnecting it to the new faucet. Awesome.
As I contemplated this problem, I realized that there was a small trickle of water coming from the pipe. Huh. Weird. I'd turned off the water. Figuring it was just residual, I left it alone. Going down to my basement to look for more tools (because some tool in my basement was going to somehow UN-rust the pipe, right?) I stopped dead in my tracks.
THERE. WAS. WATER. EVERYWHERE.
It was leaking from the kitchen, pooling underneath and running anywhere it could. Luckily the basement floor is concrete but seriously there is water running through the floor, even I know that this is a huge freaking problem.
My heart raced and the panic of being in way over my head set in. What had I done wrong???? How could youtube.com have lead me astray???? How much damage had I done???? How much was this going to cost me????
I tried to pull myself together and made a frantic phone call to a plumber friend of mine. As I explained the problem to him, I had this image of him holding back hysterical laughter at this silly girl trying to do home improvement and I could feel embarrassment creeping past my hysteria. But graciously, he sent a guy over to take a look.
Well ladies and gentlemen, remember when I was laying out those steps? Yeah, I missed one.
After you turn off the water cut-off (which I did correctly, thank you), it is critical that you drain the water out of the system. To some extent I knew this and thought I had taken care of that by turning on the kitchen faucet to let it run. I was wrong. The most effective way to drain the system is to open up the lowest faucet in the house, in my case, a utility sink in the basement. When the plumber did that, a gush of water came out.
He assured me with a smile that I hadn't done irreparable damage and that it was a simple mistake. Then the guy was swell enough to replace the rusted elbow and install my faucet for me (at $126 per half hour, !#@&!).
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| My Sweet New Faucet....installed by someone else. |
Unfortunately, this project was a DIY Fail for me. I was so excited that I jumped the gun and things got out of hand. I'm grateful to the plumber but was disappointed that I hadn't been able to complete the project myself. What kind of DIY Girl am I? The kind who knows when to say when. So there are two morals to this story, dear friends.
1. When doing plumbing work that requires you to cut off the water to the house, be sure to drain your plumbing system by opening the lowest faucet in the house until it stops running.
2. Know when you're in over your head, and don't let pride ruin your sub-floor.
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