Water ! (But in a Good Way)

Lawrence was here today. It was an odd hodgepodge of jobs I had lined out for him. But like I told the mother, it’s all those “little things” that we never seem to get to because the bigger jobs always take infinitely longer than planned or something else pops up and keeps us from getting them done.

Today’s list was so light that I revisited the issue of the 2-3 minutes it takes to get hot water in the kitchen. This has been going on since we put the new water heater in last June. Initially, it was really annoying. But, like a door that always squeaks, or that funny noise your car sometimes makes, you just get used to it. So, we learned to live with waiting for the hot water in the kitchen.

Since then, we’ve had a series of issues with the faucets and I’ve said several times “Let’s just buy new fixtures.” We finally did last year. (In fact, it was kind of this purchase that spurred the whole “let’s redo the kitchen” movement.) They’ll be installed with the new sink.

But that wasn’t helping us right now.

Even before the new water heater, we’d had issues with the kitchen faucet. It had progressively lost water pressure. Not surprising. The city has a lot of smaller, older lines. But … those got replaced recently so I was wondering why the water showed no improvement.

Lawrence thought the problem might be the connection of the kitchen faucet’s hot water line to the water line in the basement. He thought a fitting might need replacing. After fighting with the fitting for more than 20 minutes, another part came loose instead. “This isn’t jammed up,” he concluded. So back upstairs we went.

One by one, Lawrence eliminated potential problems. But then, things got worse. Where we once had slowly streaming take forever to get hot water, we now had barely a trickle. “It will take you two years to fill the sink at that rate,’ Lawrence quipped. He finally took the single spigot off and to steal a line from Shakespeare “there’s the rub.”

A valve inside it that controls the switch from the faucet to the hose sprayer (something that has never worked right and which we only used briefly after it was first installed) had rusted and was clogging the line!

After he popped the culprit out , not only did the water get hot within a matter of seconds, it shot out like a fountain. Hot water and water pressure returned. I’m still giddy about it. The mother is, too.

Amazing the things you can just learn to live with sometimes.