Faucet Repair Gone ... Satisfactory

The bastard that chose to crap all over my Saturday night

I’d be the first to admit that I’m not the handiest guy around. This isn’t a point of pride, by any means; and I’m generally not a fan of having pride in one’s ignorance. The fact that you don’t cook, don’t read, or can’t change a tire isn’t a personality trait, so no need to hang any part of your identity on it. For me, it’s just a hole in my knowledge that developed without any effort. My dad wasn’t terribly handy either and I’ve been privileged to get by with other people being able to do this work. That said, I can hang a picture straight, and where the situation calls, can turn to Google if necessary.

The situation called loud and clear on Saturday night when the cold-water handle of the kitchen faucet popped right off as I was washing the dishes just before midnight.

Let’s just say containing a gushing geyser with my bare hands while my wife tries to keep the baby asleep in the other room isn’t my preferred way of spending a Saturday evening, but we don’t always get what we want.
Fortunately, she was able to step away and come to the rescue, grabbing a thick towel which allowed me to cover and contain the flow long enough to switch off the tap underneath the sink.

But now what? It was too late to call the handyperson and with the water flow contained, it was no longer an emergency. What I also had to keep in mind is that during the pandemic we’ve been pretty hunkered down, and not letting people into our house when we have the choice was a key part of our COVID mitigation strategy. So now we have to organize the plumber to come in just as we’re almost out of the worst of it (fingers crossed). Seemed like such a waste.

So I rolled up my sleeves and made a second attempt at getting to the bottom of this faucet handle – a faucet handle that was now at the bottom of my sink. I’d tried once before, when it first started leaking, but couldn’t get past the “remove the handle” stage. The instructions said either undo the screw or pop the handle off. I couldn’t find a screw and the handles wouldn’t pop off, so that dead-end made me feel less than clever, to put it mildly.

Having the handle now in my hand allowed for a closer look, and found a sneaky hex-socket screw (the typical IKEA Allen wrench screw) that got out with some serious wiggling. One of the two never got back in, but I’ll just focus on the victories for now.
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Having the inner workings of the handle now available, the diagrams on the internet made that much more sense. Turns out, I had a busted o-ring in my cold-water handle, which didn’t create the right seal. Not only that, but the fact that my handle managed to pop off with the water pressure meant that the main screw that held it in place was also loose for a while. The “how” of “how it happened” though was far less important than the “how” of “how to fix it”.

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Highly recommend familiarizing yourself with everything in this picture

​I dismantled the hot water handle to compare the two and to switch o-rings and then put the faucets back exactly as they were, turned on the water pressure … and found both the hot water and the cold water were now flowing through into the faucet itself without me having to turn the handles.

Somehow I’ve managed to eff it up even worse.

What followed was a long trial and error process that uncovered that I had loose rubber seats that were supposed to stem the water flow from the pipe to the handle, which I then put back in. This solved the problem for all of a minute, returning the moment I turned the handle, which then led to discovering that the cold tap was missing a little spring that was supposed to hold the rubber seat in place. The spring from the cold water tap lay loose in the sink o the verge of falling down the drain.

After about three in the morning, everything was in place except for a broken o-ring now on the hot water handle, but otherwise the sink was perfectly usable until I could get my hands on the spare parts to take care of that last remaining leak.

The feeling of satisfaction I experienced though was quite surprising – this was something that had sadly been completely outside of my wheelhouse, but that I was able to puzzle through. For many, it probably seems like a simple task and they’d chuckle at the amount of grief it gave me. But for me, it was a new problem I managed to solve all thanks to one of the indisputable advantages of the internet – the accumulation of nearly all of human knowledge at my fingertips.
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Hopefully trying to install that new o-ring won’t leave me botching the whole thing entirely, but I guess we’ll wait and see.

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