No Surprise, I Guess
I had a small leak in the drain assembly on the bathroom vanity. It was at a factory joint, but it turned out to be my fault. I thought it was a soldered joint. It was right where the tail piece met the underside of the drain. I didn’t realize this was a threaded tail piece that screwed up in to the drain.
I called DEA Bath and got Jim (Tim is no longer there). He explained that the I was supposed to remove the tail piece and apply pipe dope and then reattach it. As he put it, they don’t do this at the factory because it’s not uncommon for people to need a longer tail piece. If it was screwed down tight at the factory it would be hard to get apart. You don’t want to take a pair of pliers to it and ruin the finish.
As soon as he said “a longer tail piece” bells went off in my head. That’s exactly what I need. If you look at the drain in the picture above, you can see that extra 6-inch chrome tail piece just above the P trap. To me it sticks out like a soar thumb. That should be a single piece of nickel pipe that runs from the basin to the trap. DE Bath sells a 12-inch long, inch and a quarter, nickel tail piece. I can use it to replace both the original nickel tail piece and the chrome addition. It’s $28, and I swore I wouldn’t spend another cent on this vanity, but what the hell.
I also found a 30-inch door for the bathroom. I thought I was going to need to cut down a 32-inch door. A few weeks back I measured all of the doors I have stacked up in the door room and I thought they were all 32-inch. I have 18 of those Eastlake doors, believe it or not. Anyway, on Monday I decided to search out a good candidate for trimming and I started measuring them again. I was hoping to find a door that had already been trimmed a little. Sure enough, one of them was 30-inches.
It needs a little help, but it’s not too bad. The paint needs to be stripped off, that’s a given, but beyond that, it has a thin crack in one of the panels, and another very minor crack near the mortise for the lock set. It even had a very nice, working lockset in it. So that’s the job this week – getting the door ready.
Happy 4th everyone!
2 comments:
You know, I'm sure I'm not the only one who was certain you would find a solution for that chrome piece, or correctly predicted you would go with marble instead of tile for all the built-in tops, or use the gray grout instead of the antique white (and take the tub back out to re-grout underneath), and remove and replace the wall tile that was a little off around the window. So you're right, by now we are not surprised when you report you have done that which you swore you wouldn't ... isn't it kind of scary that so many perfect strangers know you that well?
"isn't it kind of scary that so many perfect strangers know you that well?"
Yes, yes it is.
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