Two weeks ago, I was washing dishes, and went to turn my kitchen faucet to the side of the sink that I rinse dishes in. It practically came off in my hand. Uh-oh. That's not supposed to happen.
Luckily, there was no water seeping (or spraying!) anywhere, so I carefully finished the dishes without touching the faucet lest it come completely off. Then I told DH that we had a problem I needed his help with.
When he started investigating, he found that the little metal plate that sat (hidden) underneath the faucet had rusted through.
If you remember my post from about a year ago where I mentioned we'd replaced the kitchen sink in early Spring of 2021 but had reused the fixtures/faucet because I couldn't find any I liked. . . I guess maybe we should have at least replaced that plate. Because it's demise was about to cause rather a headache.
In the process of removing the rusty remnants of that metal plate and reattaching the faucet (with a random washer from the garage doing the duty of that plate), we ran into a problem. The water lines wouldn't connect, even though they'd been in fine working order just shortly before, when we'd disconnected them. DH was on his back, his torso squashed into the cabinet under the sink, with limited mobility of his arms and hands. He's not a small guy, and has pretty much always had broad shoulders. Through the years they've gotten rather well padded and even broader. Not the build of a person who puts themselves into sink base cabinets. And try as he might, he just could not get the plastic clamp-on connectors for the water lines to reattach snugly.
The verdict: they were broken/damaged in removal and now we needed either new ones, or a whole new faucet (which would come with new lines and connectors). Not the thing you want to find out at 9 p.m. on a Friday night. Especially when you look up any and all of the big box stores within a 30 mile radius and find that NONE of them have that type of connector (ahem, 20 years old now) in stock.
Which meant, oh dread of the existential kind, I would have to get a new faucet. Something I couldn't find a style back in 2021 that both fit my needs and my aesthetic. I'm rather picky about the function of my kitchen faucet, not just in the part that the water comes out of, but also in the ease of adjusting temperature of the water (personally, I find two-handled faucets to take more time and effort to make small adjustments in water temp) and also what the thing looks like.
Friday night I think we were up until midnight looking and looking and looking at faucets online and then, when finding one I said was acceptable (none matched all my criteria exactly), seeing if we could get it in store the next morning without driving 100 miles to do so. We found exactly one, about half hour away.
On Saturday morning, DH went and got it. We pulled the old faucet and components out, dropped the new faucet and components in, and reconnected the water lines. All in all, that took a couple hours from start to finish (and stuffing DH in the cabinet, then pulling him out again when he got a cramp or had to take a peek at the installation diagram, and stuffing him back in again.) I got the (dubious) honor of being the tool girl, or surgical nurse, or whatever you want to call the person handing tools to DH while he was in the cabinet and could neither see nor reach them on the counter or floor, then taking tools from him when he was done with them, then handing them back again because oops, he wasn't really done with that size wrench yet.
After much marital tension, we did manage to complete the task and I have a fully functional kitchen faucet again. It's a little darker color and a little chunkier design than I prefer, but at least it's got the high arc faucet I need for washing large pots and canners and the single handle that is not attached to the side of the faucet. The italicized part being super important to me, and a huge reason it was so hard (in 2021 and now) to find a faucet I like. The ones currently in style with the handle attached to the side of the faucet just make me think of science lab sinks from high school, and, well, as much as I loved science lab, I just don't want to think of that every time I see or use (a billion times a day) my kitchen sink!
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