Tap Follow-Up, The Saga

It's the "wash-up" at the end of the day. Ohh I have sooo been waiting to use that crappy dadjoke in an article!

And here it is. 

You might first like to read about the tap, and the backstory/reason for this repair. TL;DR the house had two single taps, I wanted a mixer tap so I bought one, and when the house changed hands the new landlord got their plumber to affix the tap for me and I was in Nirvana and then the kitchen had to be remodeled in the part that included the kitchen sink. (As the old saying goes, and as it actually went this time...) Everything about this house is old, lacking in any kind of standards for electrical, plumbing, and even roofing, and the new landlord set about correcting all those major issues and the kitchen stove was the last one that got done, and involved work along the sink as well.

Beginnings

My friend RtP came to visit and we took our best shot at fixing things so I'd have a dual outlet mixer tap again. And after a few hours, we did! RtP arrived with tile glue and plumbing tools, and we were off! As mentioned, not much about the house adhered to any standards, and that included the kitchen sink.

Where most kitchen and handbasin standards mandate a tap on vertical plumbing, this one has two pipes sticking out of the wall, and they're awfully low, making it difficult to wash even a moderately large saucepan let alone a stockpot or decent sized wok.

That also meant having to find a mixer tap that affixes to horizontal plumbing. And those are generally called "bathtub taps" for the reason that - well, because that's where standards say they should go for a bathtub. 

For me, the bathtub tap has two advantages - it allows me to have a mixer style tap and bathtub taps often have a diverter to a hose and handheld shower. I didn't need a shower but I used that fitting to attach a swivel gooseneck instead, to give me a few centimetres of extra height. Best thing ever for a kitchen sink!

So if you read either of the preceding articles you'd have seen a picture of the tap I used to replace the tap that I'd originally bought and that  BtB (also in previous articles) had destroyed the one thing that can't be replaced on those taps... (Yeah, this too is in the old posts I think.) Also, the tap I originally bought had taken me months to find because the kitchen water pipes were 13cm apart and all standard mixer taps I could find have 15cm spacing. 

That was part of the issue, that BtB destroying that original tap meant trying to find that one supplier that had this one style of this one particular mixer bathtub tap that I've ever found online. It actually came through Banggood, that's how long ago this all was... Their system didn't retain the records from that far back, I didn't retain my records from that far back, and one thing I decided was that if I ever got the chance I'd get the pipework etc all spaced the the building standard 15cm. So now ANY modern tap will fit.

First Setback

We needed a grout removal tool. Which we sourced by walking to the nearby hardware store and buying. 

And which made us a bit worried about a second issue, not a setback but definitely an issue. The grout wasn't coming out as dust, but as a paste of moist dust. Mystery was revealed when RtP finally got through the grout and pried the tiles off the sheetrock panel behind. The sheetrock was wet...

That reminded me that when BtB had put the brass garden taps in, he'd had a bit of trouble getting thread tape in there on the hot side pipe. Since we had to remove the fittings he'd put there, that wasn't a problem, and in fact when I did, it proved me right because the thread tape had a distinct water channel through it. That was the cause of the water that'd accumulated on the sink! I finally realised it, and it ceased being an issue because RtP and I were re-working it and we are GOOD at plumbing.

It did leave us with the issue "would tile adhesive stick to wet rockboard?" though. But that's for later n the story.

Second Setback

The cold water side of things was a definite shock when we got to that. We pulled out a hunk of mistreated brass fittings and cobbled-together couplers that wouldjn't have looked out of place in a turn-of-last-century Victorian Steampunk anachronism. Mangled, full of old plumber's paste and electrolysis and - pretty much crap. 

Again, I'm at pains to point out that this wasn't anything the landlord could have known, it took us half an hour to unearth it out of the wall and must have been there for as long as the house was. It does paint a pretty grim picture of what we're guessing was a DIY owner/builder given how many "geological layers" of the house it was in.

So back to the hardware store and purchased some very expensive new brass, cut and prepared it to the required size and replaced that abortion of a  piece of cobblery with the new two pieces... 

Progress From Here Was Smooth

Relatively smooth. We measured the correct distance for the pipes to be apart, measured two new tiles for holes to be made in to fit the new spacing, and cut them without any major complications. We also cut them with RtP's proper diamond holesaw which was a far better fit than BtB's using an angle grinder to - quite literally - chew a hole in the tiles he'd placed. 

We also opened up a bit of space in the wall to allow better access around the pipes, and then it was a trial-fit of the tap to the pipework, and even with the tap on only finger-tight, there were suddenly no leaks. So we glued the tiles on.

It turns out that tile adhesive does stick to damp rockboard, quite well. The tap will have to come off once more to put the trim cups over the currently bare pipework but that has to wait for the grout, so for the moment it looks a bit bare(ish) but it works. The grout will need to wait for everything to dry out from the previously-built-in leak, and as it's getting cold here  that might be a few days to a week.

Result So Far:

I'm so happy to see this installed. Even though it ended up costing more due to the extra lengths we had to go to, it's still cheaper than buying a tap here in Australia at our rip-off-mark-up-buzz-off prices from a plumbing store. And anyway the kitchen now has something that's standard in all the rest of the "little crooked house" syndrome it suffers from... 

Please

I'm doing things like the above because I have to. I turn it into a story for you to enjoy and perhaps learn from, perhaps laugh at, but in any case to be entertained. Please share the URL on your social network, and also please hot one of the donation links and make a donation. I'm a genuine age pensioner, there's not much money to go around, and some of that I'm having to spend to keep this suite of blogs and servers online... 

Stay amused!