Leaky faucets

My dad says every plumbing repair requires three trips to the hardware store.  It's not actually true, but the mantra reminds me that it's okay not to know exactly what I'm doing when I'm near things that move water around.  Thanks to my dad, I'm a half-decent plumber.  For this, I should emphasize the "half" and slur quickly over the "decent". 


To illustrate, I'll show you the results of a non-repair my sons and I did over the weekend.  The shower is leaking, a slow steady drip.  Drives me nuts.  We had a plumber come last year who did his own half-decent fix.  A year later, half-decent has degraded a tad, and I decided it was time to introduce my boys to the wonders of a Wench with a Wrench.  (That's me.)

For most plumbing repairs, the first step is turning off the water to the fixture.  Here's C-son, demonstrating how to turn off the water to a bathroom sink.

Usually, the cut-off valves are very close to the faucets.

Unfortunately, in my very old house, the shower doesn't have any visible cut-off valve nearby.  So we had to turn off the water to the entire home.  In preparation for this, we first filled a bunch of buckets and jars of water just in case things went very, very bad.  It was a Saturday, and there was no way I was going to call a plumber in to fix thing$ on the weekend.  So we stocked up on water to drink and flush toilets just in case.

Then we turned off the water, using the whole-house valve.  I think every homeowner should know where this valve is, in case of emergency. 

To fix the leaky faucet, grab a wrench and unscrew anything on the faucet that seems remotely hexagonal.  Since there are so many different kinds of faucets in this world, it's hard to give more specific directions than that:  just have patience and a good wrench.

 Somewhere in all that metal, there's a small black rubber thing called a washer.  Hah!  It doesn't even wash anything!  It's really the "stopper", at least, provided it's still new enough.  That tiny little black rubber thing is the reason the shower leaks.  Take it out; take it to the hardware store (you can take the faucet assembly, too for the hardware clerks to look at), and have the clerks help you get a new washer.  It costs less than $1.

Then put it all back together, and everything should work fine.  If you're lucky.

Except in my case, the faucet assembly I took out (the cold water handle) wasn't the one causing the leak.  The hot water handle is our bad boy, and it's so old and stripped that I can't remove it without ruining it.  (In fact, that's why our professional plumber said he couldn't do better last year).  So someday I'm going to pull out the vise grips, manhandle that faucet out of there, and I'm going to need to buy a new faucet, but I didn't want to do that on a Saturday of childcare.

So we put the cold-water faucet back in, with a new washer for good luck.  We turned back on the water to the house.  The faucet dripped a bit, but no more quickly than before.  We didn't fix it.  That's the "half" part of the "half-decent".  But the "decent" part is that my boys got to learn a little bit about plumbing, and we didn't ruin anything, either.  Phew!