DIY a Stay at Home Dad can do-Replace a bathroom faucet

In our bathroom we have his and her sinks.   Each sink has its own accoutrements, soap stains and levels of dirt that happen naturally.  While I clean the sink area once I week, I’ll fess up that my side usually has a tooth paste glob on it, in addition to shave droppings.  That mess pales in comparison to the slippery funk that was in the drain area of my wife’s sink though.

That funk wasn’t due to anything she was doing.  Last time I checked my wife wasn’t in league with Zuul, Gozer or Venkman, so I’ll believe her story.  She said that the black, slimy funk was coming from the faucet.   Another reason I can believe her is that my faucet was chipped and showed signs of that too.  If you stop reading here please let the takeaway for you be this: Do not used gold plumbing fixtures, ever.

Switching out a faucet is relatively easy.  Turn the water source off, un hook everything, clean the surface area up, tape the threads, putty the underside of the base, hook the water and then wrestle with the stops.

The stopper/plunger is probably going to be the most difficult part of the job.  If you’re doing the job by yourself then you’ll have to get under the sink, look up, get under and repeat that dozens of times.  Don’t forget to put a small layer of plumbers putty to the bottom side of the pop up assembly.

If you forget to put that plumbers putty on the shaft that you insert down the empty sink then you’ll have a leak.  It’ll be a small leak that will present itself in a frustrating fashion once everything else is together.  Wrap the threads and use plumber’s putty where the instructions tell you to.

This job took me much too long because I didn’t put the plumbers putty around that shaft.  The entire job should take you about 45 minutes, but it took Daddy Mojo four five hours.  30 minutes into the job, everything was on schedule but the stopper wasn’t fitting correctly.

I looked at the old stopper and realized that it had been bent in order to make it fit.  As I was frustrated I went downstairs and got sucked into Race to Witch Mountain.  I’m a sucker for anything starring The Rock and that 90 minute break was just what I needed to clear my head and fix the issue.

Once I figured out how to fix the stopper, without bending the plastic shaft, I had a slow, drip, under the sink.  By now my back was hurting as I had been up and down and up and under the sink countless times.  I went back down stairs and watched Ninja Warrior.  The new season is amazing and their acts of manly strength was enough to motivate me to go up stairs and re-read the directions.

In reading the directions again I saw that you needed to use that plumber’s putty.  After using that putty the sink was running like Zola Budd.  This is an easy job guys, just take your time, read the directions and it should take you 45 minutes, unless Ninja Warrior is on.

As a stay at home dad I miss having the spare time to fix things.  Even though the child is my full time job, things still break or need a fix in the house.  Sometimes the repair will be something that I can easily complete and other times it’s a repair that I simply should’ve paid to have it done.  Regardless, I’ll write it up here in hopes that you may be able to gauge what you can do and when you need to call in for help.  The series is called, DIY a Stay at Home Dad Can Do, but in some cases, you shouldn’t, because of difficulty, time involved or money.  All dads aren’t equal.   If you’ve got the mojo of a plumber, plungers for arms and a limber back then bypass this series and go straight to the fart jokes, which should be in the next column.