The Plumbers of Catan

Last night, I had no success in Settlers of Catan or Seafarers of Catan. Alas, I managed to stake out a good amount of terrain but I was unable to convert my resources into the required amount of points (and twice learned an old lesson--chasing the longest road never works for me). But in plumbing, I had success!

I recently had a bunch of plumbing work done. This allows me to do home plumbing now. Task one was to fix the faucet in the half bath that could only be turned off by tilting the handle to the side.

So yesterday afternoon I turned off the water supply (oh joy! of being able to do that!), and removed the handle. But there was nothing apparently I could adjust or tweak inside this mechanism to fix it. And apparently the act of disassembling it caused a further break in functionality since after I put the handle together again, I could not turn off the water at all with the faucet handle.

So off to the hardware store for a new faucet. I wanted to hurry since I had to pick up Mister and Lamb from school. But I had a few hours, so no problem.

Problem one was that I was so happy to have found a similar faucet that I didn't notice that it doesn't have the drain rod. Oh well. The kids don't play in the sink any more and I can still close it if I have to from below the sink. No big deal.

No, the big deal was when I crawled under the sink to remove the old faucet. I simply could not budge the plastic wing nuts. There was simply too little room to get leverage. I used wrenches and pliars and bare hands and rubber-gloved hands. I hammered and pried with a knife to loosen the fasteners. All I succeeded in doing was get woozy from looking upside down so much.

I did research and found that I needed either a special tool or I could make one with a piece of PVC pipe.

I found a piece several weeks ago lying on the grounds here at Casa Dignified, and almost stored it away "just in case." But then I thought, why on Earth would I need a single piece of plastic pipe? How much storage space do I have, anyway?

Who knew?

And the above mentioned plumber actually left a special wrench that I found and gave to him as he left. My only solace in that is that it was made for metal nuts and not the plastic ones.

But my new sink has the metal nuts...

Anyway, a saw didn't seem like it would work. Although I thought that superior firepower could be brought to bear with a drill to just shred the plastic wing nut (I didn't need to re-use them--just remove them), I checked with a friend who was coming over for game night. He suggested I wait to call down fire on my own position until after he brings some tools he's found useful.

We drank beer, watched the Tigers win, and played board games. And my friends were highly cooperative in not getting confused by my instructions to use the bathroom toilet but wash their hands at the kitchen sink (although one friend obviously perplexed asked "Wash hands?").

So after coming close to having my Catan strategies work but failing in the end, just after midnight I picked out one of the angrier looking imported tools with long pointy grips and got under the sink. In about 3 minutes I had both loosened and off!

That success meant I even got to avoid borrowing tools for longer than 5 minutes. Friendship has limits and any man will at least hesitate putting his favorite tools in another man's possession lest they defect to the borrower over time.

Today I cleaned up the gook from the old faucet, installed the new one, reattached the water lines, and turned the new one on. Success!

No drips either from the faucet or from the plumbing under the sink!

After cleaning up the mess, excess caulk, and putting away tools, I finished in about an hour. Which was better than I'd figured yesterday when I started (but before the interruption that stalled my operation).

I even avoided throwing out the handle to the old sink when I remembered that one faucet upstairs has a slightly damaged handle that I could replace after I clean up this newly old handle.

I have one more leaky faucet in my kitchen. I'm going right to the replacement stage since it has the same internal ball design as the bathroom faucet. So unless I want to order replacement parts for the insides, I might as well replace the whole thing.

Maybe Sunday.