Monday, May 02, 2005

Further adventures in homeowning

So it turns out that not every weekend is devoted to the joys of house restoration. Some weekends...some friday mornings in fact...are devoted to cursing the kitchen faucet which can't possibley have decided to actually, physically break and no longer turn on water. but oh yes it can. Some freakin metal piece broke off. Broke right off. Fortunately beth is all feeling that the underside of the kitchen sink is her domain now. So after trying to repair the hateful faucet thing only to find that, despite new cartridge, O rings, grease, and sealant it preferred to spurt annoyingly from the base, she installed a brand new faucet and sprayer. The current one is certainly not the final one. Not the lovely goose-necked thing we'll install when we reno the kitchen counters and sink. But it IS a delight of basic chrome whose sprayer works beautifully, tap flows strongly, and yes, whose handle turns both on and off and AND hot and cold without one's throwing one's full body weight against it for torque.

2 Comments:

At 5/03/2005 09:06:00 AM, Blogger Scott in Washington said...

Time we have owned our house: 3 years

Number of frigging faucets I've had to install in the kitchen: 3

I don't know if we did something to offend the water gods or what, but I seem to pay for it on a regular basis. Granted, the first faucet I put in was a cheap-o American Standard, but the Moen I bought at Home Despot and put in after that was relatively spendy. I had to actually put three of them in before I got one that wouldn't drip. So technically I've had to lie on my back in kitchen, looking up at sink innards five times. The Moen lasted about a year and then I had to do it all over again.

This last time I went to the local independent plumbing supply place and told them to sell me their most dependable faucet, regardless of the cost. They gave me something approved by NASA and guaranteed not to break down between now and the second coming (I kept the receipt).

One thing I learned when we bought the spigots, shower heads, etc for the master bath remodel is that more expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better as far as dependability and good engineering goes. We bought really heavy, shiny, accessories that didn’t turn out to work all that well. The spigot was designed to neither screw on nor solder onto the copper piping but was instead held in place only with a set screw. I replaced it a year later with a five dollar surface engineered, metal over plastic spigot that screwed on and works fine. The beautifully shiny and heavy drain had to be taken out within a year as well and currently a fifty cent rubber stopper is doing the job.

 
At 5/03/2005 10:41:00 AM, Blogger K said...

Evil faucet. I'm glad that you exorcised it.

 

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