I’m A Plumber: Installed a Bathroom Faucet Myself

For Chanukah, I bought my wife a matching faucet for the rest of the hardware in our bathroom. Yea, I got my wife a faucet for Chanukah, I know!!! I even used Live Search to save 25% on the faucet.

The hard part was not ordering the faucet, it was putting it in. I ordered it a while back, but did not install it until Chanukah. So the other night, I installed it. Now, I have never done any serious plumbing before. So I was a bit nervous, but at the same time, excited to give this a try.

I read the directions twice, the first time I read it in order and the second time I read it backwards. I had to first remove the old faucet and then put in the new one. So reading it backwards helped me understand exactly which pieces I needed to remove, this way I can retain as much of the old faucet as possible.

There are many web sites that have how-to guides on this. I didn’t look for them until I wrote this post. In any event, Home Depot has a good how to over here and a video. In short, shut off water, unscrew both hot and cold water supply lines, unscrew plastic big joints that secure the old faucet. Then place the new faucet in, and screw everything back in.

Now what it doesn’t show are two things. (1) Working with the drain stopper and (2) replacing the hardware for the drain. For that, you need to unscrew the sink drain from the bottom of the sink. I found a picture of a sink drain, you basically need to un-screw the metal piece from the bottom of the sink. In fact, the hardware in the sink (typically a silver plate around the sink hole, is screwed into this piece):

So you unscrew this, which is also connected somewhat to the drain stopper device, and then put in the new hardware above the sink drain, then screw back in the sink drain pipe below into the sink drain’s new hardware. Then getting the faucet’s drain stopper (whatever it is called) to be hooked up with the level you pull up and down was fun.

But after about 30 minutes, I got it working and the new faucet was installed. A few days later, the sink has yet to leak – so maybe I did it right. I did seem to forget to use a silicon glue to stop leakage, so I hope that doesn’t come to bite me later.

I enjoy knowing how the pieces in my house work. Now, if I can now get into doing some hard wiring of networking, such as TV, Internet and security systems – I will be set.