The Money Pit, Part One

We have had a leaky kitchen faucet for weeks. I've also been nagging Robert for the past five and a half years to fix it because it wasn't installed properly to begin with. When we turned on the water, the whole assembly would move, exposing the sink holes on either side, and a lot of times the faucet would drip into the sink holes and make a mess in the cabinet underneath. Anyway, it started leaking in earnest at the beginning of December. By Christmas, I was hearing water spraying under there after I turned it on. By the next Saturday, my kitchen floor was wet, and finally Robert decided to do something about it. He did a quick diagnostic and decided we needed a new faucet. So he went to Lowe's after receiving strict instructions to buy something other than chrome, something higher than the one we had, and not to take three hours finding it. He returned two and a half hours later. With nothing.

(Side note: Robert takes forever to make decisions. He'll stand in the aisle at Lowe's and look, ask the clerk, check reviews online, check for better prices online, and then wander around while he considers whether it's a good deal. Then he'll reconsider, and repeat the whole process five or six times. It's exhausting.)

So upon his return he told me the same old story ... "I found one that was a good price, but then someone told me that they bought one last year and it's already broken, then I found another one but the guy working there said people return that one all the time and so I looked for high reviews on Amazon and I found one but Lowe's only has it in chrome and we have to order the stainless steel one and you know they just don't make things like they used to  because the one we have has been there for at least twenty years and we never had a problem with it and ..."

"Honey."

"What?"

"Did you order it?"

"No."

 *sigh*

After a little more nagging, he finally ordered it a couple of days later. We got it in the mail Friday. Awesome, we have all weekend to work on it! But let's go hiking this afternoon, we can do it on Sunday. So, Sunday morning dawned. I took my shower before anyone else was up and cooked a big breakfast. As we sat enjoying our breakfast, I casually asked Robert what he would like me to do to help with the faucet. He said, let's go to the beach! And, stupidly, I agreed. It rained, so we came home. When we got home, Robert told me to warm up the food.

You know that word that starts with a P and ends with a rocracstination?

He finally got his stuff together, and just as he was about to pull the faucet out, a wingnut got stuck. The bolt was rusted so bad it had corroded the threads. We pushed, we pulled, we chiselled at it with a screwdriver, we even got out the hacksaw. Finally, Robert tried his skilsaw (yay, power tools!) and we scratched the finish off the sink, but the faucet was finally out. We got the new one in, tightened it down, had to readjust it because I put it on crooked, and as Robert was about to connect the hoses, he happened to look at the hot water hose. It. Was. Gross. By this point, poor baby K's whimpers had turned into shouts and finally sobs. Robert said he was going to buy new hoses while I fed K and put her to sleep. As he was about to walk out the door, he realized that Home Depot closed at 8 on Sundays. It was 8:15.

I was suddenly reliving that panicky Sunday night in sixth grade when our Eskimo dioramas were due the next day and I hadn't even started and all the stores were closed early because it was Sunday night and we had no sugar cubes in the house and everyone knows you can't build an igloo without sugar cubes.

To be continued ...