It Started With a Leaky Faucet -- June 2013

It started with a drippy faucet. The one in the hall bathroom, which was unfortunately installed through a wall of tile and could be accessed only by either (a) ripping out the tile or (b) cutting a hole through the wall from the adjacent bedroom closet.

I (LJ) am relatively handy. I can fix the random washer, or even replace the works in lots of faucets. Plumbing’s not my favorite, but I can generally do the little home repair things.

Not this time, though. The works – original to the kid’s house in 1968 – were stubborn and unwilling to cooperate, and replacing them was beyond my abilities. I can sweat a pipe – it ain’t pretty, but I can do it well enough that the soldered fitting won’t leak – but breaking into walls and trying to replace entire faucet sets exceeds my abilities.

And nobody seemed to like my alternative repair system – specifically, a large pair of “Vice Grips” attached to the hot water handle so you could get enough leverage to actually turn the water off.

So while we were debating what to do, we started looking around and realized that the place could use a bit of sprucing up. The avocado tile in the downstairs bathroom shower seemed a bit dated, to put it politely. Ditto for the gold up in the master bath.

So we started looking at options and, as with every home improvement project since a Neanderthal rolled a different rock across the room to provide a better flow through the cave, things quickly expanded.

After all, the most expensive words known to a homeowner are, “As long as we’re here, we may as well . . . . . “