fun with faucets

We got the replacement parts for our defective kitchen faucet installed around 4 pm. It required a special tool that they didn't send us with the parts, but we found that an old adjustable bicycle bottom-bracket tool substituted quite well. Overall, the whole procedure took about twenty minutes. The hard part came when we turned on the water again and the ten-year-old O-ring on the hot water shutoff disintegrated and plugged up the faucet.

We extracted lots of O-ring fragments, but the sprayer hose was still plugged. I spent half an hour poking the remaining fragment with the end of a bicycle brake cable, and lo and behold, out came... a brand-new rubber one-way valve. We think the valve came out of the new part but didn't belong to it. We'll be speaking to Price-Pfister about it in the morning.

What I learned today is that you can't repair a faucet unless you have the correct bicycling paraphernalia. Also, you can use a combination of astrology, the Bible, and New Age something or other to predict the future.