Every time working on the house involves swinging a sledgehammer and generally banging on things, rust inside our terrible, terrible galvanized steel pipes flakes off into the water and clogs up the aerator on the faucets. When this happens the water faucets slow to a trickle. This means that nearly every time I have to swing a sledgehammer I have to then bring the pipe wrench up to the bathroom and kitchen faucets, take off the aerators and clean them out, removing the little flecks of rust. Then the faucets work fine again. At least, they did until yesterday.
Old faucet
I’d been dealing with the progressively worse faucet in the bathroom for about a week and finally cleaned out the aerator. Unfortunately, either loosening or tightening it back on resulted in an sudden flood of water under the sink and onto the floor. It’s a pedestal sink, which in this one case was a good thing because it meant I noticed the problem right away instead of after it had soaked things, but it was still a mess. Of course this was right after we had gotten back from a big trip to Menards, where I easily could have bought a faucet and it was late and Sarah was taking the car the next day.
After removing the faucet, which was rather a pain because the hoses connect up underneath the sink where there isn’t any room to work, I took it apart and confirmed that it wasn’t possible to repair it. The faucet is very cheap. It may not actually be that old, but it’s basically designed to leak at least some water, and not designed for the aerator to be regularly cleaned out. We ordered a new faucet for pick up in store from Home Depot.
We decided that Sarah could drop me off at Home Depot on her way out and I could take the bus home. I’ve taken the bus to Home Depot on a couple of other occasions and the timing worked out really well. I was worried that on a Sunday I’d have to wait a while, but the bus was there right as I came out of the store and I hopped on. The next one would have been 18 minutes later.
New faucet
We can’t fix the tile that won’t come clean, but we can put in a nice new faucet. It’s WaterSense, which means in uses less water but more importantly for our purposes puts out a decent stream despite our poor water pressure. The idea is that we’ll re-use this faucet for the basement bathroom, along with a shower kit we bought years ago that’s still in the box. That limited us to brushed nickel, which was good because we didn’t really plan on designing our other bathrooms just yet. I’m excited because it’s single handle, which I think is easier to use.
