BWW Project 25-9: TDY Sara's -- New Bathroom Faucets & Drains

 BWW Project 25-9:  TDY Sara's -- New Bathroom Faucets & Drains

One more project getting Sara's old house ready to put on the market.  She has an upstairs bathroom with double sinks.  The faucet on one sink is broken and cannot be repaired because the cowling where the handle assembly fits in is broken as well.

First step is to try and match the other faucet.  A trip to Menard's found one that is very, very close.  The spout is almost identical but the column that the faucet sits on is narrower in diameter (not much) and the lever of the handle is slightly different.  I texted pictures of both and she ultimately said "buy two" which is probably the right decision even though it means more work.  Bought two.

A few days later, I went down there, turned off the shutoff valves and removed both old faucets.  It could have been harder but after pulling two drawers, I was able to remove them without much difficulty.  The hoses from the valves to the faucet risers is a different story, as I expected.  Two feeds come off each shutoff valve and I had to buy some more hoses to make sure I could match to the new risers which were different from the old.

Mounting the new faucets was easy enough.  Then I noticed that new pop-up drains were included with the new faucets.  The old ones were scuffed and worn and ugly, so it was a no-brainer to put in new ones.  Unfortunately the drains and traps had to come out to do this.  More work.  Having the drain pipes somewhat out of the way made it easier to deal with routing and connecting the new feeds.  Naturally, I ran into a problem connecting the hot left feed because the male end on the tee was right up against a partition in the cabinet and the new fitting would not quite line up so that I couls engage the threads.  I struggled with this immensely and decided I needed to come back the next day with roto-cutter and take away some of the material from the partition so I could line them up.

Next day, I spent about an hour and a half trying to do just that and realized, aftert I cut a valley (with great difficulty) in the side of the partition.  It had a corner support beneath so I couldn't just notch it out.  Finally I gave up and decided to buy one more stainless steel encased feed tube and re-route the whole thing while simply capping off the male end of the tee that I couldn't line up.  

That worked OK and I was happy to re-charge the water and find everything worked.  Except for one small drip.  Murphy's Law.  One drop about every 25 seconds is intolerable.  I tried to tighten the fitting only to find that the valve handle was in my way as was also the part of the drain tube that went between the sinks.  Again, I needed a plan.

Ultimately I opted to return a third time because we were going to Easter

dinner at Aaron's folks house.  Afterwards, armed with the bit to fit the handle, I removed that from the stem and found that now I could get two channel-lock pliers in there with good vision angles, hold the tee with one and tighten down the female nut with the other.  I believe I got rid of the drip, so I put the handle back on, hooked up the traps to the new pop-up drains and left a plastic tray beneath for Sara to check and see if any drips occurred.