Tuesday,
January 27, 2009

Oh, baby it's cold outside

When the rain started to fall in earnest this afternoon and the incoming cold front arrived in North Dallas, my manager, may blessings be called down upon her head, told me to pack up any files I could and go home ASAP.

Who am I to argue with a manager? So I came home, called into a meeting at 2:30 PM and spent the rest of the afternoon editing simulations and getting them ready for SME approval. Once 5:30 PM rolled around, I headed back upstairs to finish work on Sink One (we have two in the master bath).

The taps were put in last night, but as one of the fasteners on the old tap was jammed in place and took an hour and a half to get off (all the while as I'm on my back, half in the undersink enclosure and enjoying the marvelous feeling of crumbling old putty falling on my face and the bottom edge of the sink enclosure pressing across my shoulderblades, but I digress) I couldn't finish installing the new drain until today. Once again I ran into issues with 13-year-old plumbing, namely the fact that the old drain was in two parts which could be separated so that the throat of the old drain dropped right into the overflow drain joint, making removal easy. The new drain is one piece, however, and due to the angle of the sink underside couldn't slide into said joint.

Thus, I had to take off the U-bend (the less said about the contents, the better) and another pipe, then utilize large pliers and a heavy screwdriver to torque the overflow drain joint around until I could slide in the new drain. Once that was done, I puttied the sink opening and the new flange, got the new drain connected, put the U-bend back on, fixed a small leak in one joint by taking it apart and adding a bead of plumber's putty, and attached the drain plug rod.

Sink One is now a thing of brushed nickel beauty -- drainage is still a tad slow (despite the fact that I cleaned out the U-bend and removed pipe -- it helped to pretent I was a CSI looking for evidence. Hey, I'm allowed to daydream anything I like, and if a certain Homicide captain played a part in said daydream, well, it helped me get the sink put together faster, so there) but everything works and nothing leaks. I was tempted to put in the new taps on Sink Two, but the flickering lights from the ice storm persuaded me otherwise.

The nice thing is, considering that we spent $160 bucks just to have a plumber come out and put a new shutoff valve on the MB toilet water supply, I figure we saved at least $250 by doing this ourselves. Once Sink Two is up and running, it's time to tackle the Roman tub faucets, spigot and drain.