Before we bought this house, we knew that there were a few things that
would need to be fixed. For one thing, there were a few plumbing issues
to take care of. The kitchen faucet leaked, the garbage disposal didn't
work, and the faucet in one of the bathrooms had the hot and cold water
reversed. We didn't know much about plumbing, but a friend at work knew
plenty and showed me exactly what I would need to do. Great!
Of course, it didn't go quite as smoothly as we hoped.
We
had bought the replacement faucets and garbage disposal a month ago.
That's also when my friend Stuart told me how to install it. However,
what with unpacking boxes and people getting sick, we still hadn't
gotten around to it. Last Saturday, we decided to tackle it.
Step 1: Shut off the water under the kitchen sink. "Man!
This thing is frozen solid! Hand me that pipe wrench and I'll see
whether I can get it to move.... There! That did it. Oh. Oops." Okay, I
managed to bend the handle into a twisted mass. It wasn't going to let
me turn the water back on. And to add to the fun, the water still
wasn't completely turned off! So we needed to get a new shutoff valve.
Step 2: Remove the old garbage disposal. "No problem. All we
have to do is remove the U-bend in the drain from the garbage disposal
and-- oops! Hey, the drain pipe broke!" That's right. It was old, very
corroded metal, and it literally broke in two as Dawn was loosening it.
Okay, we'll need to get a new U-bend. "Hmm... I wonder whether the
drain pipe for the other half of the sink is also that bad." I took a
wrench and lightly tapped the bottom of the U-bend. Immediately water
began to drip from where I had tapped it. Like the other one, it was
corroded and paper-thin! So we needed to get two new U-bends. On the plus side, though, I suspect the corroded drain pipes were the reason why the water drained so slowly.
Step 3: Disconnect the supply lines. This actually involved
an easy bit (unscrew the cold water supply line) and a less easy bit
(cut the copper pipe for the hot water supply line). For whatever
reason, the dishwasher doesn't have its own supply line. Instead, the
hot water supply line goes to a tee, with one line leading off to the
dishwasher and the other continuing to the faucet. Therefore we had to
cut the copper pipe above that tee in order to remove the faucet. We
did this without any problems. Hooray!
Step 4: Disconnect the supply lines from the faucet. Our
first hurdle was figuring out how to get a wrench up behind the sink to
disconnect the lines. In addition, there's just no room there to turn a
wrench, even if you could get it up there! We fairly quickly realized
that we would need to go to the hardware store to find some tool that
would work better than what we had. It turns out that there is a tool
made for this very task. It's called a basin wrench. Who knew? (Okay,
plumbers knew. We didn't.) Once we had the basin wrench, it was much
easier to reach, but things were frozen solid. No joy. At that point we
began talking about the possibility of just replacing the entire sink!
Then we realized that there was nothing holding the current sink down
except for gravity, so we could just remove the current sink and
perhaps have far more leverage for removing the old faucet. After
letting a little bit of penetrating oil work for a couple of minutes,
we were able to remove the supply lines. Hooray!

Halfway there!
Step 5: Install all of the new stuff! I put that all as one
step because, once we got all of the old stuff disconnected and
removed, installing the new stuff was fairly straightforward. For one
thing, it was easier to install the faucet with the sink out than it
would have been if the sink were already installed, so that was
helpful. Install the faucet in the sink, drop the sink back into the
counter, put the compression fitting on the copper pipe that we cut,
connect the supply lines to the faucet, mount the new garbage disposal,
connect the new P traps, connect the dishwasher to the garbage
disposal. We're done! Now do a happy dance!

We have a kitchen sink! As you can see, we immediately put it to use.
By the time we finished, it was Tuesday. (Actually, we're only halfway done with the bathroom sink, but all we have left to do there is install the new faucet, so there aren't any surprises remaining there. Really.)
A guy working at the
hardware store told us that every plumbing project required 3 trips. He
told us this on our third trip to the hardware store, so I guess he's
right! (Actually, we made a 4th trip, but that's just because we forgot
to get something on the previous trip. *sigh*)
Yes, it would have been much easier to have just called a plumber.
However, by doing it ourselves, we
learned quite a bit about plumbing. That means that, not only did we save money this time, but we'll save money again the next time we
need to fix something, and it will be easier than it was this time.
Next on the agenda: Learning how to do electrical work!
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