Our kitchen faucet has been leaking for a while. I finally got around to calling a plumber. He said the leak was inside the faucet, but he could install a new one for $$$. We said, "No thank you. We'll do it ourselves." And he didn't even charge us for the service call - go, Mr. Rooter! So, I bought a new faucet (this time without the pull-out sprayer because I've heard those tend to leak more than the other kind) and decided I could install it all by myself.
Tobie was a big help. She sat on the instructions and rubbed against my hands and even crawled under the sink with me.
The kids were actually a bit more helpful than that. Helene handed me tools and gave me lots of advice. Campbell took a picture of me at work:
After I'd been under the sink for about 2 hours (still trying to remove the old faucet), I had the kids start making dinner. They had to haul water from the powder room sink and fill up a pot on the stove, since I didn't have the kitchen water working yet. You'd have thought from the complaints that I was having them fetch water from a well in the back yard! But they were very helpful.
I finally realized why I was having such a hard time. Where the faucet had leaked, it had rusted, so there was one nut that was extremely difficult to remove. I had to give up and ask John to finish removing it when he got home (thank you!).
Here's the inside of the corroded, rusty, old faucet:
And all of its parts, once it was eventually removed:
Doesn't the new faucet look nice?
Next problem . . .
The water supply tubes do not reach the water supply lines. There's an inch gap between the hot ones and about four inches between the cold ones! Uh oh.
So now I'm having a cookie and doing internet research. If any of you know how to fix my problem, please respond! I'm assuming I may have to go back to the hardware store and get some sort of extension. I'm on my fourth cookie of the afternoon, by the way. Frustrating plumbing repairs require lots of cookie breaks.
