I said I wasn’t going to try this again!

Actually, what I said (in “Don’t Try This at Home”) was, “But while I don’t intend on doing this again, I’m glad I didn’t give up.”

But that was nine years ago, before the pipes under the sink started leaking and the bowl I had under there to catch the drips got full to overflowing at midnight, just when I was getting ready for bed. I cleaned up the mess and realized that not only was there a leak, but the pipe from the drain was plugged up with all kinds of gunky stuff that I had to clean out of it.

By the time I had taken out the offending pieces and taken a shower because now I felt contaminated and watched a couple of YouTube videos to refresh my plumbing memory, it was 2:00 a.m. And of course, then I couldn’t sleep.

So the next day I decided I might as well get to work on this. I was originally only going to replace the drain and extension piece to the P-trap, but then I thought, if I’m going to go to all that trouble, I might as well replace the faucet too. I looked through this very blog and found that it had been 2017 when I’d last done it, so I was probably due for a new one anyway. My trusty assistant was thinking, “Wait, didn’t we do this already?”

I went online and ordered this faucet from Lowe’s, to be picked up in-store. Gone are the days when I want to wander around Lowe’s or anywhere else in search of faucets. There is quite a difference between doing this kind of stuff when you’re 59, and nine years later when you’re 67. You don’t think you’ve aged that much, but trust me, you have.

I didn’t have as much trouble getting the old faucet off as I did the first time, even though the plastic nuts did stick a little bit.

It was probably harder to get the new faucet out of the box!

Do they really think someone is going to stand in the faucet aisle and try to take this out of the package so they can walk off with it?

It felt like a repeat of “Second Childhood, Part 3”, when the family of bunnies were hopelessly stuck in their plastic packaging.

I just think Grandpa Bunny is so cute!

Since I was going to need a new extension piece leading from the new drain to the P-trap, I went to Carlos’s store, (otherwise known as Fresno Ag Hardware) and got this.

But, since the metal parts under the sink were permanently stuck together, there was no way to unscrew them to insert the extension piece. So, I had to take them off all the way to the first piece from the wall.

Back to Carlos’s store for a new P-trap kit!

First, lay all your parts out to make sure you’re not missing anything.

Turns out you have to cut these to fit your space.

This would prove no problem, I knew, because I had Daddy’s saw(s) in the garage.

So, it was a little harder than I thought. My cuts didn’t come out just perfect, but I was happy enough with them by the time I finished.

Not quite!

Finally, after more sawing and measuring, I thought I was done. But I was mistaken.

This called for a trip back to Carlos’s store.

The nice man at Fresno Ag looked at the pictures I showed him on my phone and suggested changing out the plastic “slip joint nut” (who knew that’s what they’re called?) for a metal one. He explained that plastic doesn’t attach very well to metal in cases like this. He also suggested some rubber washers, saying they would work better than the hard plastic ones that came with the P-trap kit.

Yay! It’s finally finished! There is still an ever so tiny leak at that spot, and maybe I should put some Teflon tape around the grooves on the end of the metal pipe. I read you aren’t supposed to use it on plastic, so I hadn’t brought any in from the garage. Since this whole job took me about three days to complete, I decided to worry about that later. I was just happy to have finished it without giving up.

As it happened, I’d bought his Fluidmaster kit a few months ago, because the toilet was running more than it should. I’ve replaced several of these in my lifetime, and it isn’t hard to do. But I couldn’t remember where I had put it, so it had never gotten installed. I found it a couple of days before the current sink incident, so when I finished the faucet and the P-trap, I said to myself, “Well, now that you’re on a roll, you might as well install that, too.”

Would it surprise you to know that there is a “Part Two” to this story?