Sometimes a Plumber

We love our 1955 home.  The best parts are the things that haven’t been changed.  Like our pink and green bathroom.  

It is shaped like an L so you need two pictures to take it all in.

Can’t miss the Mermador!

Lacey and I knew we were buying the house the instant we saw the bathroom.  The sellers left a note apologizing for it.  It was next on their list of things to correct, but they didn’t get to it.  I won’t show you the kitchen they “corrected.”  I don’t need to.  Open a sale flyer from Home Depot and find the kitchen with dark wood cabinets, an island with a granite countertop and faux stone easy install locking flooring.  I am not saying the kitchen isn’t nice.  It works.  It simply doesn’t have that WTF were they thinking magic of our most excellent bath.  We added period white globe fixtures to dress it up, but it is still a McKitchen.  Sigh.

The bathroom wasn’t perfect.  The first thing we had to fix were the fixtures on the sinks.  They were original and matched the others in the home so I wanted to keep them, but they were hard to turn and sometimes leaked.  I didn’t know what was inside.   I had never opened one up.  I imagined corroded brittle metal ready to snap on the next turn.  The shut off valves were not operational, so if something happened, we’d have to shut off the main and go without water until we could get a plumber.  In an emergency, we’d have to accept some heinous contemporary fixtures that would mar the vintage goodness of the rest of the room.  So we ordered cool Kohler fixtures for all three bathroom sinks in the house.  They were close to matching the others and we knew we’d love having well functioning faucets.  Then we called the plumber.

Thought making the call would be the hard part (I hate having people work on my home).  After he chopped up the first old one to get it out, turned out the new fixtures were slightly larger than the holes in the sink.  While the plumber removed the other two, I took out a dremel and ground on the sinks to make the holes bigger.  Ground on the faucets to make them a little smaller, too.  Tough work, but the plumber got them all in.  What a day.

Recently the hot water stem on the shower started leaking while on.  My heart sank.  I feared we’d have to get a new fixture and maybe even tear out some of the tile to get it in.  I wasn’t going down that road without a fight.  I read that sometimes tightening the bonnet nut on the stem would stop a leak.  I was afraid to do anything (no shut off at all), but I had to try.  I removed the handle and gave it a good shot of Liquid Wrench.  Waited a day and gave it another shot.  Waited another day and got out the big wrench.  The one with all the leverage allowing a ham-fisted handyman to snap off a fixture.  Was I going to be that doofus?

I stared at the thing for minutes.  Felt like hours.  I wanted to see into it, to know if it was about to disintegrate or in good condition.  My x-ray vision would not come up no matter how long I stared.  I  placed the wrench and gave it a meager push.  Clockwise to tighten it.  Nothing.  A harder push.  Nothing.  A little more and… it moved!  I stopped.  I was pumped and terrified.  I got really conservative all of a sudden.  Maybe the sixteenth of a turn would be enough.  I ran downstairs to turn the water back on to see if it had stopped leaking.  Sadly, it hadn’t, but I now knew if I could tighten it, I could loosen it.  If I could get it apart, I had a chance of finding the right part on the web and fixing it myself.  No new fixture.  No tearing out tiles.

I was able to get the stem out.  I didn’t know it was called a stem until I started hunting around the internet.  My family is littered with plumbers, but they didn’t share anything with me.  Probably because I didn’t ask.  In my ignorance, I half thought faucets were made of two parts.  A fixture with pipes connected and a handle that threads in to control the water.  I had no idea there was a third part that was easily removable and replaceable.  The stem!  Oh wonderous internet.

I found Faucet Parts Plus in Oklahoma.  Wonderful place.  They seem to have everything.  I guessed my shower fixture was American Standard, as that was marked on all the other fixtures, and I found the replacement stems pretty quickly.  Ordered a kit with new handles, trim, stems and seats.  I needed to put the old stem back in while we waited for the parts.  I greased it up with vaseline, as suggested on some site, put it back together and, voila, no leak.  I still wanted to replace the stem, but at least we were up and running while we waited.

We had never really used the tub in the bathroom.  That fixture was really spooky.  Extremely hard to turn and you had to crank them pretty well to shut them off.  Instead of risking catastrophe, we just stopped using the tub.  With my improved understanding of stems and their replacement, I ordered up a repair kit for the tub, too.

Then the hard work began.  These handles wouldn’t come off like the one in the shower did.  The web told me that getting the handles off might be the hardest part of the job.  It was.  Days of Liquid Wrench did nothing.  Turns out there is a tool for the job.  A faucet handle puller.  I got one and thought I was home free.  It took a couple of hours with the tool.  It kept slipping, so I had to hold it together with band clamps and work slowly.  Nothing.  More internet.  I read heat helps.  Heat makes metal contract and can break the calcification and rust that has all but welded the parts together.  Trusty hairdryer.  No longer used for hair.  Just weird projects that require heat.  Lo and behold it worked.

Decorative collars around the fixture probably didn’t have to come off, but getting them off would make the job easier, so I started the Liquid Wrench routine again over a couple of days.  These collars were chrome and round (no wrench flats).  I didn’t mind tearing them up as the repair kit included new ones, but even with channel lock pliers I was struggling mightily.  Heat helped again.  Three hours later, I had the collars off.

The stems should be easy.  I am happy to report, they were.  I did the Liquid Wrench routine again, to be safe, and used heat as well.  Got them both off.  I could have probably worked to get them apart, replaced o-rings, greased them and reused them, but I had new stems.  No reason to take the chance.  

Guess how much the stems cost?  If you buy just the stem, only $3.00!  I can only imagine what  plumber would have cost.  Would they have even wanted to try to fix the existing fixtures?  I needed to do small things over the course of days and weeks.  A little every day.  A plumber needs to get in and get out.  They probably have tricks to make it go faster, but I am so glad to have tried.

I was instructed to replace the seats while it was open.  I had the new seats and a seat removal tool,  but the seats looked fine.  I didn’t want to push my luck.  Easy to get back in if I change my mind or if the faucet leaks later.

The stems get lubricated with special plumbers grease.  Turns out vaseline will damage the rubber o-rings.  Plumbers grease will not.    

The threads of the bonnet nut that holds the stem in the fixture get thread compound.  It helps form a seal, eases later removal and is non-toxic.  A third special product, too.  Plumbers putty.  I formed a rope with that and pressed it around the fixture and against the tiles to close the holes.  If the stem leaks, there is now less chance it will make its way behind the tiles.  No picture of the plumbers putty fix.  The picture below shows the original installers plumbers putty with gaps after 50 years of sitting there (or maybe the plumber didn’t do a complete job originally).

It all went together really well.  Works like new.  Looks great.  I replaced the shower stem, too.  Since I had used vaseline on the old one when I had it apart, it was only a matter of time until that stem would leak again.  That went well, too.

We have our vintage bathroom back now in all its pink and green (and brown, did I forget to mention the metallic brown accent tiles?).  Fully operational, tub too!  I couldn’t be happier.

I have used up my luck for the day.  Caution is in order for the balance.  Take care.