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Feb. 28th, 2011 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickToday I got to learn about the distance between my mental concept of how a job will go and the reality of how a job actually goes when you get down to doing it. The task at hand: replacing tub faucets in the downstairs at 321. Reason for replacing? Hardware store does not carry faucet seats suitable for faucet repair anymore because the faucets are too damn old. (We have a VERY good hardware. If they don't have it, it ain't being made.) Faucet is currently leaking due to a bad seat and it cannot be fixed, so time to replace.
Mental concept of how to replace tub faucets.
1. Go into basement, turn off water.
2. Go into bathroom, open both faucets to take pressure off.
3. Remove faucet handles and hole-coverer-uppers.
4. Go into closet backing up onto tub and remove shelf items, shelves, wall panel for access to back of tub faucets.
5. Undo unions, unseat pipes, remove tub faucet fixture.
6. Drive to hardware, buy new fixture of suitable type
7. Install new fixture by inserting through holes, attaching unions, snugging up.
8. Check for leaks by turning water back on
9. Fix leaks if any
10. Replace access panel, shelves, shelf items
11. PROFIT
Here's what actually happened.
1. Go into basement and turn off water. When I was opening the outer door to basement, it came off hinges and into my hand. (It is made of wood and exceedingly heavy. I was not aware that I was beefy enough to rip basement doors off their hinges, but apparently I am. Who knew?) Tabled the issue for later because it was raining like a bitch out. I shut off the water.
2. Open faucets to take pressure off. I did that and then noticed that the water was not *exactly* off. It was only mostly off. Oh, well. I decided to work fast so that the constantly dripping water would not be that much of a problem.
3. Remove faucet handles and hole coverer-uppers. Note that I forgot about having to remove the tub faucet thing. No biggie. I had both screwdrivers, both crescent wrenches, and the channel locks. Channel locks should be fine, right? Er. No. Massive amounts of vein-bulging effort along those lines revealed to me that all the fucking channel locks were doing was scraping the chrome off the brass fixture. Bugger all. I went back out to the truck (in the rain, which was still pouring down) for the pipe wrench. It's always at the bottom of the truck because it weighs three thousand pounds. Pipe wrench onto tub faucet thing. Lefty-fucking-loosey, baby. Oh, yeah. Who da man? Who da man? That's right, I'm da man! (I am, in point of fact, not da man or even a man. However, at this point in the repair process my spirit was not yet broken and I was still looking for victory instead of merely escape.)
4. Go into closet backing up onto tub and remove shelf items, shelves, wall panel for access to back of tub faucets. This went reasonably well. I only had to go back out to the truck once for the utility knife to cut the caulk around the access panel. (Could not see caulk ahead of time because it was DARK in the closet and there were shelves in the way when I evaluated the situtation prior to getting tools.) It was raining when I got the utility knife.
5. Undo unions, unseat pipes, remove tub faucet fixture. The lovely brass unions undid, the pipes had enough play in them to drop down out of the fixture with plenty of room for me to remove the old fixture, the only downside was that then the supply line that happened to be lower started to drip. Constantly. Shutoff valve was not working well, recall.
6. Drive to hardware, buy new fixture of suitable type. I like the hardware. They're good people and they have lots of interesting things at their store. I talked to the hardware about my tub faucet needs. Now, most two-handle tub fixtures are arranged like two eyes and a nose. The hot and cold faucets are on a level (like eyes) and then below and in the middle is the spigot part (like a nose) where the water comes out. This is not how the tub I was working on was arranged. Once upon a time, long ago in history back, there were tub faucets that were arranged like the three dots in an ellipsis: ... The hot knob, the spigot part, and the cold knob are all in a straight line. This was a tub like that, so an ordinary tub faucet would not work because the holes in the tub surround were in the wrong places for an ordinary tub faucet. Fortunately, the hardware had a tub fixture with all the stuff in a line and they sold me that one. It's built kind of like a sink faucet, with straight line threaded stems that you screw the water supply lines onto. Also, because I mentioned that the hot and cold supply lines originally came straight up and hooked via unions to the bottom of the old fixture, they sold me some threaded sharkbite elbows to make the 90 degree turn (the new fixture did not have built-in turns like the old fixture did) and connect to the half-inch copper supply lines (which cannot be sweated because the water will not shut off completely and you cannot bloody well sweat pipes if they have water in them). I figured that I could cut the unions off the supply lines (they had some play in them) and seat 'em into the sharkbite elbows without too much hassle. And since there was no shower in tenant apartment, I bought a threaded cap for shower part of fixture so that it would not leak all over everything. Okay! Took a little longer at the hardware than expected, but I had all the parts I'd need to fix this. It was still pouring rain.
7. Install new fixture by inserting through holes, attaching unions, snugging up. No. New fixture did not quite fit into holes from old fixture. Holes were just a bit too narrow. I got the drill and the 1" spade bit and commenced to embiggening the holes suitably. It was not going so well. WTF? Lovely spade bit was not doing shit-all and I was leaning on the drill pretty good. I removed the drill. I peered into the (dark, mind, because I am in a closet) half-drilled hole. Hunh. The spade bit was not able to drill through framing nails. (This particular spade bit probably can't drill through warm butter anymore, either.) I went out to the truck (still raining) and got a chisel and hammer. I broke out wood around the framing nail and bent the nail out of the way. Bits of wood covered the floor of the closet. It was wet wood, too, because the fucking cut pipe was dripping all over everything while I fucked around. My tenant (a little white-haired old lady) was peering timidly over my shoulder: "Is everything all right?" Me (bluff, hearty voice): "Of couse, it's going fine. Nothing to worry about!" Fixture did fit through the holes at this point, so I had cause to be optimistic. Short-lived cause, though, when I discovered that the existing threaded stems (supposed to poke through the holes and had nuts to screw onto them to tighten them up in place, kind of like sink faucets.) did not reach all the way through the holes in the framing lumber. They were significantly too short.
7a. Drove back to the hardware. Purchased plastic unions and nipples to make the stems longer. Still raining like a bitch.
7b. Taped up threaded stems and nipples, assembled with unions, inserted into holes. Observed that now the entire assembly was 2" beyond where the copper (not particularly mobile) supply lines were coming up and I hadn't even GOTTEN to the fucking elbows yet.
7c. Went out to truck (still raining), got hacksaw. Unscrewed union/nipple assembly from stem and cut off half of stem with hacksaw. Repeated for other stem. Carefully wrapped fucked-up cut threads with teflon, rethreaded unions onto them being exceedingly gentle and obsessive about not cross-threading. (When you cut threaded stuff, getting it to work in threaded applications afterward is somewhat challenging.) Checked distance again. Looked good.
7d. Taped ends of nipples, put on elbows. Er. Not so fast. See, you have 2x4 framing on either side of the stem holes. There was not ROOM to turn a threaded elbow because it ran into the 2x4 framing. On the left side (I was facing the back of the faucets) of the cold and on the right side of the hot, there was framing. Fortunately, I had the hammer and chisel inside already. More pounding and splintering noises. Tenant expressed concern. Bluff, hearty "No, no, everything's fine, I just need a little room to turn these fittings." Not sure the tenant was buying it. She offered to wait until my dad got home from Mexico and inquired about how long that would be, anyway.
7e. Then I threaded nipples on and tightened them up. Cool. Looked pretty good, reallly. I cut off the union ends so that I could connect the copper supply lines to the sharkbite elbows. (Sharkbites are a newer kind of plumbing fixture that you just kind of shove the pipe into and it doesn't leak. Magically. No tools required. They also come apart again later if you want. They are awesome.) I cut off the unions and put them in my "recycle" pile along with the heavy brass tub fixtures I'd removed. And I went to connect the supply lines to the sharkbite elbows. *tug* *tug* Hrm. Pipes were not long enough. I had a sharkbite union in my truck and some extra half-inch copper from the washer we removed from Pam's. That'd get me one of the lines. And I had a compression fitting and ferrules from the water heater in 19 that I had to replace the previous week, which would do the other. Go me!
7f. I made both supply lines long enough to fit into the sharkbites. I inserted them into the sharkbites and the fucking leaking stopped. Awesome! I mopped up the water and the wood bits in an effort to make the tenant think I wasn't destroying her abode. But the fixture was not snug against the wall of the tub surround and it wobbled if you tried to turn the handles. There hadn't been room to install the nuts to tighten it up like a sink faucet. No problem, thought I, I will use bits of wood stuck between the supply lines and the framing to hold the tub fixture snug against the wall of the tub surround. I went out to my truck (still raining) and got a piece of 2x4 and brought it back inside. I broke up the 2x4 piece with the hammer and chisel so that it would be the right size and I stuck the pieces in between the supply lines and the framing. Surprisingly, this worked as advertised and made the tub faucet nicely snug against the wall.
7g. I went back to the closet backside to admire my work thus far when I noticed that the cold water side elbow had a pregnant drip hanging off of it. While admiring the fucking drip, I noticed further that despite my best efforts, I had managed to cross-thread the damn elbow onto the plastic nipple. (The elbow was brass. Brass threads can eat plastic pretty easily.) Oh, hell. So I compressed the sharkbite end of the elbow to remove it from the copper supply line. It slipped off abruptly in a spraying explosion of pressurized water because the "shut off" water fucking well WASN'T shut off. If you hook up plumbing to a not-exactly-shut-off water supply, pressure builds up while you're off fucking around with making shims out of hunks of 2x4. I was already wet from the extensive rain, though, so it's not like it mattered. I tried to unscrew the elbow fitting from the nipple, but the whole entire elbow/nipple/union fitting unscrewed and I had to disassemble the elbow after that, rethread the nipple/union onto the cut threaded stem without fucking it up, process complicated by the fact that the relevant work area was in the middle of a non-transparent 2x4 framing timber, and then rethread the sharkbite elbow onto the nipple. This did not brighten my day. At all.
8. Check for leaks by turning water back on. This went nicely. I went down into the basement, turned the water back on slowly, and observed the lack o' spinning of the water meter (conveniently located inches from the not-exactly-shutoff valve).
9. Fix leaks if any. There were no leaks at this point.
10. Replace access panel, shelves, shelf items. Did that without incident.
11. PROFIT. I think I missed this step.
11a. Realize along about Breezewood that I left the fucking basement door unseated.
11b. Drive rest of the way home. Fix fire so that house will not be cold when I eventually get there.
11c. Get in car (better gas mileage).
11d. Unstick car from 6" mud pit that used to be yard. Make mental note to gravel that as an additional parking area come better weather.
11e. Drive to Everett, fix basement door so that opening to basement is covered and the pipes will not freeze.
Mental concept of how to replace tub faucets.
1. Go into basement, turn off water.
2. Go into bathroom, open both faucets to take pressure off.
3. Remove faucet handles and hole-coverer-uppers.
4. Go into closet backing up onto tub and remove shelf items, shelves, wall panel for access to back of tub faucets.
5. Undo unions, unseat pipes, remove tub faucet fixture.
6. Drive to hardware, buy new fixture of suitable type
7. Install new fixture by inserting through holes, attaching unions, snugging up.
8. Check for leaks by turning water back on
9. Fix leaks if any
10. Replace access panel, shelves, shelf items
11. PROFIT
Here's what actually happened.
1. Go into basement and turn off water. When I was opening the outer door to basement, it came off hinges and into my hand. (It is made of wood and exceedingly heavy. I was not aware that I was beefy enough to rip basement doors off their hinges, but apparently I am. Who knew?) Tabled the issue for later because it was raining like a bitch out. I shut off the water.
2. Open faucets to take pressure off. I did that and then noticed that the water was not *exactly* off. It was only mostly off. Oh, well. I decided to work fast so that the constantly dripping water would not be that much of a problem.
3. Remove faucet handles and hole coverer-uppers. Note that I forgot about having to remove the tub faucet thing. No biggie. I had both screwdrivers, both crescent wrenches, and the channel locks. Channel locks should be fine, right? Er. No. Massive amounts of vein-bulging effort along those lines revealed to me that all the fucking channel locks were doing was scraping the chrome off the brass fixture. Bugger all. I went back out to the truck (in the rain, which was still pouring down) for the pipe wrench. It's always at the bottom of the truck because it weighs three thousand pounds. Pipe wrench onto tub faucet thing. Lefty-fucking-loosey, baby. Oh, yeah. Who da man? Who da man? That's right, I'm da man! (I am, in point of fact, not da man or even a man. However, at this point in the repair process my spirit was not yet broken and I was still looking for victory instead of merely escape.)
4. Go into closet backing up onto tub and remove shelf items, shelves, wall panel for access to back of tub faucets. This went reasonably well. I only had to go back out to the truck once for the utility knife to cut the caulk around the access panel. (Could not see caulk ahead of time because it was DARK in the closet and there were shelves in the way when I evaluated the situtation prior to getting tools.) It was raining when I got the utility knife.
5. Undo unions, unseat pipes, remove tub faucet fixture. The lovely brass unions undid, the pipes had enough play in them to drop down out of the fixture with plenty of room for me to remove the old fixture, the only downside was that then the supply line that happened to be lower started to drip. Constantly. Shutoff valve was not working well, recall.
6. Drive to hardware, buy new fixture of suitable type. I like the hardware. They're good people and they have lots of interesting things at their store. I talked to the hardware about my tub faucet needs. Now, most two-handle tub fixtures are arranged like two eyes and a nose. The hot and cold faucets are on a level (like eyes) and then below and in the middle is the spigot part (like a nose) where the water comes out. This is not how the tub I was working on was arranged. Once upon a time, long ago in history back, there were tub faucets that were arranged like the three dots in an ellipsis: ... The hot knob, the spigot part, and the cold knob are all in a straight line. This was a tub like that, so an ordinary tub faucet would not work because the holes in the tub surround were in the wrong places for an ordinary tub faucet. Fortunately, the hardware had a tub fixture with all the stuff in a line and they sold me that one. It's built kind of like a sink faucet, with straight line threaded stems that you screw the water supply lines onto. Also, because I mentioned that the hot and cold supply lines originally came straight up and hooked via unions to the bottom of the old fixture, they sold me some threaded sharkbite elbows to make the 90 degree turn (the new fixture did not have built-in turns like the old fixture did) and connect to the half-inch copper supply lines (which cannot be sweated because the water will not shut off completely and you cannot bloody well sweat pipes if they have water in them). I figured that I could cut the unions off the supply lines (they had some play in them) and seat 'em into the sharkbite elbows without too much hassle. And since there was no shower in tenant apartment, I bought a threaded cap for shower part of fixture so that it would not leak all over everything. Okay! Took a little longer at the hardware than expected, but I had all the parts I'd need to fix this. It was still pouring rain.
7. Install new fixture by inserting through holes, attaching unions, snugging up. No. New fixture did not quite fit into holes from old fixture. Holes were just a bit too narrow. I got the drill and the 1" spade bit and commenced to embiggening the holes suitably. It was not going so well. WTF? Lovely spade bit was not doing shit-all and I was leaning on the drill pretty good. I removed the drill. I peered into the (dark, mind, because I am in a closet) half-drilled hole. Hunh. The spade bit was not able to drill through framing nails. (This particular spade bit probably can't drill through warm butter anymore, either.) I went out to the truck (still raining) and got a chisel and hammer. I broke out wood around the framing nail and bent the nail out of the way. Bits of wood covered the floor of the closet. It was wet wood, too, because the fucking cut pipe was dripping all over everything while I fucked around. My tenant (a little white-haired old lady) was peering timidly over my shoulder: "Is everything all right?" Me (bluff, hearty voice): "Of couse, it's going fine. Nothing to worry about!" Fixture did fit through the holes at this point, so I had cause to be optimistic. Short-lived cause, though, when I discovered that the existing threaded stems (supposed to poke through the holes and had nuts to screw onto them to tighten them up in place, kind of like sink faucets.) did not reach all the way through the holes in the framing lumber. They were significantly too short.
7a. Drove back to the hardware. Purchased plastic unions and nipples to make the stems longer. Still raining like a bitch.
7b. Taped up threaded stems and nipples, assembled with unions, inserted into holes. Observed that now the entire assembly was 2" beyond where the copper (not particularly mobile) supply lines were coming up and I hadn't even GOTTEN to the fucking elbows yet.
7c. Went out to truck (still raining), got hacksaw. Unscrewed union/nipple assembly from stem and cut off half of stem with hacksaw. Repeated for other stem. Carefully wrapped fucked-up cut threads with teflon, rethreaded unions onto them being exceedingly gentle and obsessive about not cross-threading. (When you cut threaded stuff, getting it to work in threaded applications afterward is somewhat challenging.) Checked distance again. Looked good.
7d. Taped ends of nipples, put on elbows. Er. Not so fast. See, you have 2x4 framing on either side of the stem holes. There was not ROOM to turn a threaded elbow because it ran into the 2x4 framing. On the left side (I was facing the back of the faucets) of the cold and on the right side of the hot, there was framing. Fortunately, I had the hammer and chisel inside already. More pounding and splintering noises. Tenant expressed concern. Bluff, hearty "No, no, everything's fine, I just need a little room to turn these fittings." Not sure the tenant was buying it. She offered to wait until my dad got home from Mexico and inquired about how long that would be, anyway.
7e. Then I threaded nipples on and tightened them up. Cool. Looked pretty good, reallly. I cut off the union ends so that I could connect the copper supply lines to the sharkbite elbows. (Sharkbites are a newer kind of plumbing fixture that you just kind of shove the pipe into and it doesn't leak. Magically. No tools required. They also come apart again later if you want. They are awesome.) I cut off the unions and put them in my "recycle" pile along with the heavy brass tub fixtures I'd removed. And I went to connect the supply lines to the sharkbite elbows. *tug* *tug* Hrm. Pipes were not long enough. I had a sharkbite union in my truck and some extra half-inch copper from the washer we removed from Pam's. That'd get me one of the lines. And I had a compression fitting and ferrules from the water heater in 19 that I had to replace the previous week, which would do the other. Go me!
7f. I made both supply lines long enough to fit into the sharkbites. I inserted them into the sharkbites and the fucking leaking stopped. Awesome! I mopped up the water and the wood bits in an effort to make the tenant think I wasn't destroying her abode. But the fixture was not snug against the wall of the tub surround and it wobbled if you tried to turn the handles. There hadn't been room to install the nuts to tighten it up like a sink faucet. No problem, thought I, I will use bits of wood stuck between the supply lines and the framing to hold the tub fixture snug against the wall of the tub surround. I went out to my truck (still raining) and got a piece of 2x4 and brought it back inside. I broke up the 2x4 piece with the hammer and chisel so that it would be the right size and I stuck the pieces in between the supply lines and the framing. Surprisingly, this worked as advertised and made the tub faucet nicely snug against the wall.
7g. I went back to the closet backside to admire my work thus far when I noticed that the cold water side elbow had a pregnant drip hanging off of it. While admiring the fucking drip, I noticed further that despite my best efforts, I had managed to cross-thread the damn elbow onto the plastic nipple. (The elbow was brass. Brass threads can eat plastic pretty easily.) Oh, hell. So I compressed the sharkbite end of the elbow to remove it from the copper supply line. It slipped off abruptly in a spraying explosion of pressurized water because the "shut off" water fucking well WASN'T shut off. If you hook up plumbing to a not-exactly-shut-off water supply, pressure builds up while you're off fucking around with making shims out of hunks of 2x4. I was already wet from the extensive rain, though, so it's not like it mattered. I tried to unscrew the elbow fitting from the nipple, but the whole entire elbow/nipple/union fitting unscrewed and I had to disassemble the elbow after that, rethread the nipple/union onto the cut threaded stem without fucking it up, process complicated by the fact that the relevant work area was in the middle of a non-transparent 2x4 framing timber, and then rethread the sharkbite elbow onto the nipple. This did not brighten my day. At all.
8. Check for leaks by turning water back on. This went nicely. I went down into the basement, turned the water back on slowly, and observed the lack o' spinning of the water meter (conveniently located inches from the not-exactly-shutoff valve).
9. Fix leaks if any. There were no leaks at this point.
10. Replace access panel, shelves, shelf items. Did that without incident.
11. PROFIT. I think I missed this step.
11a. Realize along about Breezewood that I left the fucking basement door unseated.
11b. Drive rest of the way home. Fix fire so that house will not be cold when I eventually get there.
11c. Get in car (better gas mileage).
11d. Unstick car from 6" mud pit that used to be yard. Make mental note to gravel that as an additional parking area come better weather.
11e. Drive to Everett, fix basement door so that opening to basement is covered and the pipes will not freeze.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-01 04:49 am (UTC)Holy sweet zombie Buddha yes.
Every repair job larger than "hang up that picture" seems to turn into that sort of Bataan Death March at some point.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-01 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 01:18 am (UTC)