In the Mundanities of Life file, I’ve had a leaky shower for several weeks. Conn and I have been shutting the hot water off at the valve after using the shower, and turning it on again when we want to use it. A little annoying.

It’s an old claw foot porcelain tub with a faucet fixture that pokes out of it going up. The old one (I know now that I’ve take it apart) was an odd mixture of very cheap plastic and nicely machined metal. The one metal part that wasn’t the best was a very small one that the rubber gasket abutted to when it was closed. It had several chips out of it that caused the hot water to drip when “closed”. Over years I’ve had to increasingly tighten the hot water valve tighter and tighter.

The faucet handles were stuck on by rusted screws. One stripped out, the other broke off, while trying to remove them. I had a set of drill bits I don’t use, and thought they were metal bits. Wrong. After snapping on of them without producing one perceptible metal shaving, I went to the store and bought some titanium bits. They worked like a dream, and the handled popped right off.

I then needed a deep socket that was 3/4 inch. Of the the C&D once more and that was solved. The time spent driving to and from was less that what it would have been had I tried to unscrew it otherwise. The right tools are glorious.

Unscrewing the convolution of pipes that poked out the back of the tub with very little clearance took some dexterity, flexibility, and perseverance.

Then I trotted off to the U-Plumb-It (on Montrose). This store is great! It has everything you need to help you do it yourself, including the how-to info (though I didn’t need that in this case), and a whole lot of cool things to fix up our old houses in the Heights/Montrose area.

I’ve been wanting a nice chrome redo of the tub for a while. And now I have it. It was 10 times easier to put on than the previous one prob’ly was, a 100 times easier than the old one was to take off.

And now I have new fixtures for my old claw foot tub/shower.

-b