Back to work

Life conspired for a while to keep me from getting much done on the house, but I'm back to work. First up: replacing the faucet in the bathroom sink.

Before I moved in, we almost completely redid the main bathroom in the house. My dad and I took out the old vanity, cabinet, light fixtures, and miscellaneous hardware. The flooring contractors replaced the ratty white carpet (!?!) in the bathroom with tile and laid in a new toilet base. My dad and I hooked up the new toilet, and then my parents worked together to put in a new vanity, medicine cabinet, and shelving unit. I don't remember which of us put up the towel racks. The only thing we didn't replace was the tub and its surround. (We did put in a new showerhead and tub faucets.)

Imagine my dismay when, 3 months into living at the house, the brushed nickel coating on one faucet handle started to bubble. By the time I pried the faucet off this morning, the cold water handle was basically chalk, and the hot water handle was starting to show signs of corrosion.

That will teach me to buy the cheapest bathroom sink faucet that I could find. (In my defense, it was on sale: I didn't know it would have been the cheapest faucet in the store even without the sale.)

The replacement is a mid-grade Price-Pfister faucet with some nice touches, like a high arch on the spigot that makes it easier for tall people to wash their hands (or fill a bucket, or whatever), and a bit of elegant detail on the handles.

It was touch and go there at the start. Sinus problems were one of the things that had been keeping me from getting much work done around the house. Although I no longer have dizzy spells whenever my head changes altitude or direction, and I don't have the sense that I'm coming down with the plague, the room does still spin when I lie flat on my back, such as, say, when I'm lying under a sink, trying to disconnect some plumbing hardware.

That was exciting.

Once I got the faucet installed, it took about half an hour for the nausea to go away. Once I was pretty sure I wasn't going to lose breakfast, I went out and dug holes in my yard for a while to clear my head. Then I finished hooking up hardware.

So now I have a fully-functional sink again. No leaks so far! Hopefully I won't have to do this again for quite a while. (It will take a while to recover: there's the residual dizziness from lying under the sink for so long. Plus the cut on my thumb from when my hand slipped as I was tightening the plunger thing that controls the drain plug. And then there's the aching in my hands and wrists from loosening bolts and nuts that my dad had tightened, and from attempting to tighten blots and nuts almost as tightly as my dad would have tightened them.

Good times. (C., if you're reading this: that one's for you.)

And that was just the start: there was the aforementioned hole digging (and root sawing, and weed pulling), plus the furniture rearranging! So stay tuned.