Okay, the duct tape didn't hold. Not a surprise but more a disappointment.
I went to draw some hot water from the kitchen sink so I could scrub the refrigerator this morning and heard the drip, drip, drip of water under the cabinet. Sigh. Sure enough, water was leaking from the spray hose again. Turns out that the culprit was the pipe connection and not the crimped end of the hose. The duct tape barely covered that junction so it was overwhelmed by the flood of water. Nothing to do but try to replace the hose. Right! Easier said than done.
I must have wrestled with trying to unscrew the pipe fitting for half an hour before I realized I needed a pair of vise grip pliers. Problem is I must have thrown the cabin's set into my tool box last summer and it was sitting down in the Aerie. Okay. There's a little mom-and-pop hardware store not too far away and since I didn't need groceries today, that was where I headed. Got a pair of vise grips (I now own three...or maybe four...there's the trailer's tool box...also at the Aerie) and came back to the Bolt Hole. No go. After 15 minutes I could see this was not going to work and the nut on the pipe was nearly round instead of hex shaped.
I decided to take the entire faucet out and see if I could separate the pipe then. Oh-oh! I snapped one of the plastic fittings that held the cold water pipe tight against the underside of the sink. These things are supposed to be finger tight. HA! I ended up using a drill to loosed the plastic and the faucet wrench was then able to get the damn thing off.
With the faucet in one hand and wedged between my knees, I was able to grip the recalcitrant pipe with the vise grips and get it apart. I had a spare spray hose and could have installed that or, since I now had to return to the hardware store for the broken plastic nut, I could get a brand new faucet...one without a spray. Since the spray has been the big bugaboo on several occasions, I opted to replace the whole sheebang. That took just 15 minutes when I returned but there is no leak at all so I count that as a victory. Not a cheap one considering the faucet wrench (also in the tool box back at the Aerie), vice grips and the replacement spray hose I purchased but it's done. (I should be able to return the spray hose, which I no longer need, next time I'm in the area of Lowes.)
2 comments:
I'm sure you're familiar with Murphy's Law, and its corollary: "Everything is more complicated than it looks, and takes longer than you think."
Don't you just hate when that happens? It happens to me all the time.
Yeah, it's one of the "joys" of working with an older piece of construction and one of the reasons why independent contractors who work as handymen will not be suffering much in today's economy.
Post a Comment