seventhe | Adventures in Homeowning: the Faucet Episode (Reply)

Are you ready for this? Cause buckle up, chucklefucks, I’m about to tell you the fuckin’ comedy of errors that was my life last week.

Spoiler: this was only supposed to be about a faucet.

Background:

my old faucet dripped. It was a small drip, and I got into the habit of leaving a pitcher underneath when I went to work, and then using the water for my plants, which I personally thought was a great fuckin’ idea. I want to redo the entire kitchen in the next year or two, so my mindset has been basically “live with it now, fix it later.”
my mother, on the other hand, just could not get over the goddamn fact that a faucet somewhere three hours away from her own kitchen, in a different state, was occasionally dripping. This should tell you a lot about my mother.
so it turns out that I get a new faucet for Christmas. Just a plan, average, nothing-exciting faucet. Mum was so pleased with herself. She thought it was hilarious. Spoiler: it was not.
My husband (Crown Royal himself) and I don’t live together, but he does me a lot of favors around the house when I have fibro days.
My husband is incapable of stopping at anything less than what HE considers perfect.
My husband, Crown Royal himself, is almost as much of a disaster as I am.

Story: So I’m in Chicago. lassarina and I traditionally get together over MLK weekend for general debauchery and games, mostly games. It’s been a great weekend (which can be its own entry), and it’s Monday morning, and I know I asked Crown Royal to stop in and feed the cats, so I’m absently mulling over whether I should push the trip an extra evening or not. I notice I’m getting a good number of notifications from the Cat Cam in the house - Motion detected in Family Room - so I’m like, hey, something good must be going on. I open up the app, expecting to see some furry cuteness.

Instead, it’s my fucking husband, crawling under the sink.

My first thought: awww, he’s gonna install my new faucet.

My second thought, as I watch him emerge, come around to the other side of the counter, and attempt to pull my fucking sink out of the countertop: i need to go home right now.

It’s a 6-hr drive from Chicago back to the Feymarch. At some point I text Crown, like, WTF are you doing? Are you installing the faucet???, fully knowing myself that you don’t need to remove the entire goddamn sink to install a fucking faucet. He replies, Long story, I’ll tell you when you get home, which is scary enough that I set the cruise control even faster and consider prayer as a lifestyle choice.

By the time I get home it’s 22:00 Feymarch time, I’m exhausted and really just want to have a pee, shower, and go to bed.

I come in through the garage, lugging my suitcase. There’s shit all over my kitchen floor, my OLD sink / faucet / garbage disposal is lying on the tile looking like it lost a fistfight, Crown’s halfway under the sink again, and he says to me: “You’ve got about three flushes left, the water’s off. Here’s your new faucet, sink, and garbage disposal.”

After a brief moment in which I consider a good old murder/suicide, he explains. He went to change out the faucet, but all of the fittings on the old faucet had rusted themselves to the old sink, and he couldn’t pry them off, even after going to Lowe’s for a special tool to do so. So he decided the solution was to replace the sink as well. In removing the old sink, he found the shutoff valves all leaked, so turned off all water to the house. And the old garbage grinder, being at least 400 years old, pretty much gave up the ghost almost immediately, so after what sounded like six separate trips to Lowe’s because that’s how he is, I’ve got new everything almost hooked up and ready to go.

So that’s Monday night.

Tuesday I spend on the chaise lounge, writing, and puttering around the house, because Crown is just delivering increasingly fucked-up news from the Land Under The Sink: “they’re a half-inch off in height,” he tells me, “and I don’t know if they make a flex hose. If all they have is pipe, we’re fucked.” Great! I think. I didn’t even give a shit about the faucet! “This hose is so old it literally just crumbled in my hand.” (Call from Lowe’s) “Can you measure OD of that connector?” Later: “I don’t think they make a 3/4” connector for this.” And then: “The 1” fits. But it’s 3/4”. Where’s the clamp?” Alongside “I’m just gonna replace those valves too.” “I need the installation kit for this disposal.” (You didn’t get that when you got the disposal??? They don’t include it with the disposal???) “This is a weird size.” “I don’t have the socket I need.” After buying a small socket set: “Oh. This is metric.”

Later: “I got the wrong size valve.” Me: “But you wrote it down?” “Yeah, but I had a bladder emergency and just grabbed it.” “...you know Lowes has bathrooms, right?”

In the end I have about 75% of a working sink (the connection for the dishwasher hose is just OPEN because we don’t have a plug to fit it) before he goes back to his house for the week, frustrated. Me too!

So I’m working around all of this, hand-washing my pile of dishes slowly to not overfill the disposal, weeping internally, until Friday. The news is instantly not good.

“The dishwasher hose just broke,” he says. “It’s old. It just snapped.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “What are our options?”

“Well, I may have to cut into the back of the cabinets to try to get to where I can replace the hose, but I don’t know how I’m gonna re-run it behind all the cabinets without a major overhaul, and it might not even fit. Or we could try to pull the dishwasher out, but it looks like it’s tiled in, and if I can’t drop it using the levelers, we’ll have to take out that tile to get it out. Do you have spare tile anywhere?”

I’m looking at the dishwasher. I hate the thing. It’s ancient, the top rack stays together mainly through soggy duct tape and kitchen magic, and it’s a random Russian roulette as to which 3 settings you’re gonna be able to choose from at any given point in time. It’s terrible.

“What if we just get a new dishwasher,” I say, instead of busting up my goddamn tile floor to jack this thing out, drilling a hole in the back of my cabinets, and unleashing further chaos.

So this time I also go to Lowes. Dishwashers are on decent sale - even though I’m unemployed rn and already crying about all of this - and we get the big guy home. Crown then proceeds to install it on his own, working the old one out (“thank god I could lower the levelers a bit”) and then putting the new one in (work stops as he heads back to Lowe’s to pick up the installation kit, which I had asked whether we needed, before). At this point his fucking truck could probably drive to Lowe’s and back itself from all the times he’s made the trip.

It ends with: a new faucet, new sink, new disposal, new pipe, new connections, new valves, new dishwasher, us labeling about half the breaker box trying to find the dishwasher (and i don’t even wanna talk about who the fuck wired this house), and about $400 in tools, including this 140-piece socket set that’s probably completely overkill.

Thanks, mom.