Tag: plumbing

Well, if having a half-built garage in my back yard wasn’t enough, now I’ve got this to deal with too:

Don’t worry, though. We got it fixed, I think.  Not really that big of a deal, just a standard replacement kit for all the guts and gaskets and stuff, although the project involved an angle grinder a few too many times for a project like this.

We had a pretty busy weekend, but not working on the house. We had just enough time to try and tackle a small plumbing job we’ve been meaning to get around to since we moved into the house a few months ago. There’s a half-bathroom in the basement, which is really pretty dreary looking, but we hardly ever use it, so we’re mostly ignoring it for now.

However, the sink has been dripping non-stop and it wasting a phenomenal amount of water. We finally had a chance to figure out why it was leaking, and what we needed to do to fix it. We figured it was something small, like an o-ring or something, but I’d never worked on a sink this old, so I really wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into.

It turned out to be a total snap. This is a job any novice (like me) can handle.

Here’s a look at the old sink. Don’t look at the dirty wall behind it, or the dirty sink. It was that way when we moved in, and like I said, we’ve mostly just been ignoring this whole bathroom. If you look closely in the next couple photos, you can see the drips of water coming out.

To get started, just grab a hold of that hexagonal nut at the base of the knob,  and turn counterclockwise.

When that whole chrome piece is totally unscrewed, just keep rotating the handle counterclockwise and the whole thing will come out in one piece.

At this point, if you haven’t shut the water off to this sink yet, you’ll be scrambling to do so now, as water will be pouring out of that hole in the sink. We avoided a disaster like that, but we did have to shut the water off to the entire house, since the previous owner didn’t install shutoff valves on any of the fixtures.

At this point, you’ll notice a rubber washer on the end of that piece. If you’re lucky, it will be in terrible condition, because then you’ll know that all you have to do is replace that washer and you’ll be done. The washer is just held on by a single screw. I was really surprised that this screw wasn’t rusted to pieces, but it wasn’t. Go figure.

All you’ll need to do to fix it is to buy a new rubber washer. These things come in all sorts of different sizes, and the best way to find out which one you need is to just take the whole assembly to the store with you and fit the new one in place in the store. You want it just big enough that it’s a struggle to squish into place.

(The following photo is actually from a different faucet that I was doing the same repair to…)

Once you’ve replaced the washer, just re-assemble everything in reverse order and you’re set. No more leaks.

Easy stuff, huh?

This is what happens every time we do a load of laundry.

The washer discharges into the sink, which can’t drain fast enough to keep up with the washer.

This thing couldn’t drain fast enough to keep up with ANYTHING.

Eventually, it will drain, but on at least one occasion, it has overflowed on us when we got too aggressive about doing a lot of laundry. Luckily, aggressive laundering isn’t much of a problem for us. We’re always willing to take an excuse to do less laundry.

But still… problem right here.

We cleaned the p-trap and snaked the drain already, but it’s still a problem. Not sure what we’re gonna do about it. Probably just live with it.

We had no sooner than finished the Thanksgiving holiday than we discovered we were starting to have a bit of a problem in the kitchen. Check this out:

Growse. We don’t even have the common decency to remove the dirty dishes from the sink before trying to plunge the sink. Plunging didn’t work at all, by the way, even after plugging up the other side of the sink. Plunging mostly just created a waterfall underneath the sink.

Since both sink basins were equally clogged, we knew the clog was further down the line than the p-traps under the sink. We thought about calling a plumber, but decided we’d try to unclog it ourselves once. We went to the big-box store, and came home with a drain auger that we could attach to one of our cordless drills. We had never used one of these before, but it seemed easy enough. First, we had to take one of the p-traps off:

Then we just kept spinning the drain auger down the drain. We bought a 25′ auger, and we got the entire 25 feet in there without much of a problem. I was getting pretty discouraged. I was expecting to get 5-10 feet into the drain and hit an obvious clog or hairball or something, but I never did encounter any significant resistance with the auger. We got all 25′ of auger into the drain and pulled it all out about 3 times and then put it back together, half expecting it to be just as clogged as when we started.

Even though we never really felt like we found the clog, we must have shaken something loose because the drain worked great after we put it back together. Score one for us, I guess!