NOW PLAYING: Handy Man Dan17 January, 2002 The other day the faucet on the kitchen sink decided to start spraying water through some pinholes that had corroded through the metal, and it had to be replaced. The Wife put a washcloth over the holes to get through the week, but The Sunday Project was to replace the faucet. We'd picked up a "1-2-3 Home Improvement" book at the Home Depot a few months ago, and I looked up "faucet replacement & repair" and discovered that it didn't look like it would be too difficult to do. According to the book, a beginner should be able to do the job in about an hour. There were illustrations and directions, and I thought, "Hey, I can do this. If I've got decent directions to read and follow, I can manage almost anything." So I made a list of stuff I'd need and we headed off to the hardware store on Sunday afternoon. The Wife was surprised by how much one could spend on a faucet — some of them are pretty pricey. We chose one with a sprayer attachment that was priced in the mid-range, and looked like it would do the job. I also picked up a small tub of Plumber's Putty (which I ended up not needing), a pair of flexible 12"-long stainless-steel water supply tubes, and a basin wrench (which also turned out to be something I didn't really need on this job). After clearing out all the items under the sink (some of which was pretty surprising; "Why do we need this stuff?!"), the next thing to do was turn off the water (thought I'd forget to do that, didn't you?) and remove the old faucet. I squirted a little penetrating oil into the connecting nuts, since they looked a little rusty and had been there for who knows how long. The fastners came undone easier than I expected, though the position I had to work in was a little awkward. I could only make the basin wrench work to tighten, not loosen a nut. Of course, I'll admit that I might not have known what I was doing with it. With the way the old faucet was attached, the basin wrench would have been useful in the removal, but I didn't need it at all to put on the new one, just my regular old wrenches. Oh well. The old faucet came off, and I used a putty knife to scrape away some of the old gook that was left behind. We attached the sprayer to the new faucet and placed it on the sink. The Wife held it steady as I crawled back under the sink to attach the nuts on the tailpieces of the faucet. Then it was time to hook up the water supply. Well, the faucet we bought had the connections built into it, and they were longer than I thought they'd be, so the 12" water supply tubes I had didn't exactly fit. Yeah, I could loop them around to take up the extra length, but that didn't seem to be the optimal solution. We halted the project until Monday when we could stop at the hardware store again to see if there were some shorter tubes that would fit better. Well, we couldn't find anything shorter than 12", so I decided that I'd just loop the tubes I had around and fit them in that way. That worked fine, and after I tightened everything up, I turned the water back on, expecting to see little streams of water spurting from every joint and junction. But no! No leaks, no streams, no dribbles... nothing! I flipped the handle on the faucet and water came out. Cold. Hot. Warm. It worked! I did it! Then I tried to attach the PUR water filter we had on our old faucet. Oops. The new faucet doesn't have threads on the outside, they're "inny" threads. The filter won't fit. D'oh! Well, I don't know what we'll do about that, but at least we have a working kitchen faucet again, and we didn't have to call for help. "One small step for a Handy Man, one giant leap for Dan." Or something like that.
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