Little Fixes

I say these are little fixes, but then I'm not the one who had to make them. Keith would tell you they were a pain in the neck (literally) and he knows why people hire professionals.

First, our kitchen faucet has been leaking for a long time. We had a plumber here nearly a year ago to do some other work (work that was truly to be left to a professional) and he looked at it and told Keith it was a simple fix that Keith could do and gave him a part number for the replacement piece. Finally, finally, Keith got around to replacing the cartridge, which was causing the leak. He wanted to wait for a day he could do it all in one shot since the faucet didn't have shut off valves and he would have to turn the water off to the whole house. Well, the better part of a day later, the faucet was leaking worse than ever and it was evident we needed a new faucet (apparently, our hard water build-up was all that was keeping the old faucet together). So he rigged something up to stop the leaking since we were headed to my parents' for the weekend, and while there, we left the boys with my mom for a bit and picked out a new faucet. While we were out, we also picked up a new light for over the sink, since ours has been on the fritz for a long time. Then, after talking over the project with my dad, he decided he could install shut off valves as well and the men made a return trip to Lowe's to get the parts for that.

We left the farm Sunday morning so that Keith could fix the faucet when we got back. After a couple of hours and two more trips to Lowe's for the right parts (and our Lowe's is 20 minutes away), and a whole lot of this:

We finally had this:

And it doesn't leak at all! Also, we gained a sprayer so that is handy too.

The second fix was that light above the sink. When I could get the old one to turn on, it would flicker rapidly, which I called disco dishes because it was like doing dishes under a disco ball. Finally, I gave up using it at all. Replacing the light was a much simpler job than the faucet, only taking an hour or so and no runs for additional parts. I am almost looking forward to doing dishes with it. Almost.

We joked when we got the faucet and then moseyed over to pick out a light that this would be the leaky faucet that spawned a kitchen renovation. That will wait though. It was tough enough to be without my sink for a day, let alone weeks and weeks. But a couple little improvements certainly go a long way!