Oy! A Plumbing Emergency

It had been going on for a year or so. There was a slow leak every time we turned on the kitchen faucet. Usually it didn’t amount to more than a tablespoon or so, easily wiped up with the dish cloth.

Then, last month it started getting worse. There was a greater stream of water when we turned the faucet on. And worse yet it didn’t just leak out the top, it also leaked out the bottom of the fixture, unbeknownst to us. Everything looked fine but later, after we had used the faucet and gone somewhere else, upon returning to the kitchen we would see a small puddle of water on the floor under the cupboard door. We would wipe that up too, but as time went on, it started being brownish in color. Ugh!

Looking more closely we figured out that the color was from it soaking into our redwood cabinets and picking up its darker look. I figured that it needed new gaskets in the gear shift mechanism, a thing I have replaced many times in our other faucets. But this was a nonstandard Delta faucet with no model number. I couldn’t just go out to Menards and get a repair kit, because I didn’t know which was the right one. By coincidence I happened to run into the owner’s manual for it when I was going over some other papers. Now I could do something.

I tried to shut off the water on the pipes under the sink but they were frozen in the “open” position. Rats. The only thing I could do was turn off all the water in the house, which I did. Taking the faucet apart I noticed that the O-ring gaskets were in pretty good shape. The leak must be farther down inside it. And you know I couldn’t get it apart any further. Oh well, I would just have to put the thing back together.

When I did that I gave it a little extra tweak to seal it up more. But that didn’t help. In fact, it twisted the whole faucet about 15 degrees clockwise. That broke the mounting plate loose and fragmented the 20 year old sealing putty. Guess what. Now we had a more or less steady stream of water coming out all the time. We cleaned out the cupboard, got a better look, and put a bucket under the waterfall. In no time, the bucket was full and overflowing itself.

Time for action. After much agonizing over which plumber to call and no useful reviews on the internet, I ended up calling Valenta Plumbing. They had been pretty helpful to me in the past when I had to match up some really outdated parts. We plan to do some kitchen remodeling in the near future so all we needed was a stop-gap faucet to last us a couple of months. I explained that to the service man. Because nothing is easy with plumbing and the former house owners’ need to put every nonstandard device they could find into the house, it became a trick to find an economical replacement. But the guy did it. Later that day, the plumber arrived and started to work. I asked him to start by unfreezing the shut-off valves. He didn’t have any trouble at all. Not like me who can’t kneel very well any more  since my knee surgery, let alone on a hard tile floor.

In no time at all he had the new faucet swapped out for the old one and we were good to go with a shiny new one. The cost wasn’t that bad either, about $200 all told, which I considered a super bargain for plumbing, especially in an emergency situation when you are at their mercy.

Best of all, I was able to ask him all sorts of questions about our upcoming remodeling project, but more on that later.