Shameless Faucet Showoffery

Faucet Helps Spruce Up Home for the Real Estate Market

Kathy M CA USA

Total Install Time: 2 days

My husband and I are putting our house on the market in a few weeks and wanted to spruce things up a bit beforehand. One of the things that has needed fixing for years is our kitchen faucet. For some reason we've both managed to stare at the old, leaking faucet each day and never actually replace it up until now. The whole process seemed intimidating and expensive, and it was far easier to simply live with it than figure out how to do it ourselves. Faced with home buyers, now was the time to fix it.

Off to the hardware store we went, looking for something that looked neutral and didn't leak. We quickly found a shiny new faucet that even had a spray unit on the side. Once home, we opened the package and looked at the instruction sheet. All diagrams and numbers, it was pretty simple to follow.

First off (after shutting off the water), we had to remove the existing faucet by unscrewing the nuts below the sink. This proved impossible. The nuts were made of nylon and completely stuck in place. My husband tried spraying penetrating oil on and leaving them overnight, but they still wouldn't budge in the morning.

He finally resorted to using a hammer and chisel to break them off, bit by bit. Ten minutes later and we were staring at three holes in the top of the sink where the faucet used to be. Ten minutes after that, the new faucet was connected and in place. Installing it was pretty simple after we got the old one out.

Then, the acid test: would it work? We turned the water back on and lifted the lever. Water! Lowering the lever didn't shut things down right away, however. It took my husband a few minutes of tinkering to figure out we needed to run the spray nozzle for a moment to clear air from the line. After that, all was good. Our new, shiny, non-leaking faucet was in place with a minimum of grief. I just wish we'd done this years ago.