Plumb, Bob

Well, another weekend of work is finished. This time it was a weekend where we actually owned the home, so that's definitely nice.

Here's what we did: My dad and I replaced all the cheesy plastic valves with nice brass valves. I have a lot of pictures of this process, so expect a detailed run-down of this later in the post. We also changed out a frost-free sillcock (the hose spigot on the outside of your house) and repaired another. We also prepped a room for paint. Prepping the room for paint involved taking off all the cover plates for the outlets, removing the baseboards, removing the light fixtures and taking down the blinds. I also had to remove and replace the line of caulk around the window. That was Saturday. Sunday, we went and got a new fridge from my friend Dan for a very good price. It was a little gross inside and there's a certain fragrance that a fridge will get if left closed and unplugged too long, but we're working that out. I think it will end up serving us very well for the time being and then will become an excellent basement fridge. We also got to work running some cables for the A/V setup in the family room. I'll post some pictures and show you what we're trying to do. My mom and my wife also painted the first room and the color turned out beautifully. They also used a tape trick we learned that worked amazingly well that I will tell you all about. So that was mostly it. Lots of painting, a lot of caulk removal and replacement, and a lot of my dad and I pulling wires back and forth.

Okay, here's the detailed explanation of the plumbing changes we made. With pictures!

First thing's first: Turn off your water. You should have a valve in your basement or something where you can turn off the water to the whole house. Turn that off. Then run up to the highest point in the house and open up a few faucets and a shower head or something. The water will run for a while and then peter out. Now go back down to your basement and hook up a hose to the lowest point in the system and set it so the end is right at the floor drain. Open the valve slowly so the remaining water can drain out. If you don't open up the faucet up at the top, the water won't drain completely. If you have a basement laundry room, you can drain from one of the supply lines there, otherwise, you can drain the whole water heater, as they always have a drain on them. If you do that, it's probably a good idea to turn the water heater to "Pilot" so you don't just flame an empty tank. Sound good? On with the show!

These are the cheapy plastic valves that were on all of our sinks and toilets when we moved in. They suck. They break really easily and pushing and pulling on your pipes is rarely a good thing. To swap them out, first disconnect them from the sink up above.

Once you have the ends removed, you can just twist them off. It takes a while and is sort of a pain, but it'll work. You can also find a little tool that will detach the teeth that hold these on (more on this later) but we didn't know that at the time.

You can cut the tubing off with some wire cutters or something to make them easier to remove. I didn't do this on the first one and it ends up being tougher to deal with the tube just flailing around wildly. Just cut the tube off and make it easier on yourself. You can't salvage any of this stuff for later use anyway.

Okay, here are the bare copper pipes. If you want, now would be a good time to replace your escutcheons (the little cover plates) and use some emery paper on the copper pipe to smooth it out if you want. We didn't, but it probably would've been a good idea.

These are the new brass (chrome-plated, but they come in brass too) 1/4 turn stop valves. Look how pretty they are!

These are like $6/ea at Home Depot. Get the 1/4 turn ones, not the multi-turn ones. The 1/4 turns will last much longer and be much easier to use. And really, when was the last time you ever needed a faucet's stop valve to be anything other than all the way on or all the way off? You just don't.

Here are all the pieces of the valve. The piece on the far right is the valve itself. The nut and brass ring on the far left are the compression fittings to attach to the copper pipe from the wall. The smaller ones are compression fittings in case you want to use some weird plastic or non-braided lines to go up to your faucets. Don't bother. You'll see why soon.

Take the big nut and brass ring and put them on the copper pipe. If you want to use emery paper to smooth out the copper, now is the time.

The nut goes on first with the threaded side away from the wall. You can see the roughed-up copper on the other pipe in this pic. They didn't leak or anything, but it would be safer to smooth them out.

Now put the brass compression ring on the pipe in front of the nut. This ring gets compressed between the two sides of the fitting and it's what keeps the whole thing attached to the wall and not leaking. It's kind of an ingenious fitting and means you don't have to solder, which is very nice.

Now put the valve onto the pipe as far as it will go, then hand-tighten the nut onto it. I think it would probably be smart to use some Teflon tape on the valve side of this fitting as well. I didn't, but if you really wanted to make sure you don't get any leaks it would be a good idea.

You're going to need two crescent wrenches or a crescent wrench and a box-end wrench or something. Make sure you have two that are big enough to fit onto the nuts involved in this procedure before you get too far. The supply-line compression fitting has a bigger nut than most smaller wrenches can handle, so check it.

You'll be using both of these together to tighten the nut. It needs to be very tight. Don't break your arm or anything, but you need to crank it plenty. You may need to crank it less if you use the Teflon tape, but I'll never know. Because I don't think things through. The smaller one will hold the fitting in place and the larger one will turn the nut on the compression fitting to tighten it down and squeeze that brass ring.

Here's the braided hose. Just use this. It's like $4-5 for a 16" piece and only a few cents more for longer ones. Believe me, it's worth it. The other lines you can get are cheaper, but then you have to buy fittings for each end, cut it to length, bend it around everything without collapsing it, etc. It sucks. Just get this one and you'll be fine. These are pretty standard. The faucet end is bigger than the supply end. For toilets, the bigger end is actually a plastic fitting that you can tighten pretty well with your hand. With these, you'll need to use a wrench.

Here's the bottom of the sink. These are the lines that go up into the faucet handles.

You can get the top part of the braided hose on there hand tight. I found it easier to attach it to the sink first since it's pretty tight back here.

Once it's hand tight, get a wrench up there and crank it the rest of the way. This is another place I could've used Teflon tape but didn't. If I did it again, I'd probably use it on all my joints just to be extra super safe.

Now you can attach this line to the supply. Make sure you don't get cross-wise with hot and cold. As a general rule, hot is on the left, but you can always mark the supplies with some masking tape before removing the lines in the first place.

The valves are turned sideways to make it easier to tighten them down with a wrench. This also means they're off. Having them off is nice when you turn your water back on so you can see where your leak is. With the valve off any water must be coming from the compression fitting  in the rear, so you can tighten it up and tape it or do whatever to fix it.

So there you go. That's all it takes. The first one I did was tougher than it probably needed to be, but I could do one of these in maybe 15-20 minutes now that I have a little practice. Replacing these was a huge priority since the other ones kept breaking. I don't have any pictures of our other plumbing job since it took place mostly inside the basement ceiling where there isn't enough space for a camera and any tools, but I can try to describe it at least.

A frost-free sillcock is a cool invention. The spigot part is on the outside of the house where it gets cold in winter. How to keep the water in the pipe from freezing? Easy. Keep the water back far enough inside the house that the heat keeps it from freezing and keep the part that gets cold empty. The valve is about 6-8" inside the pipe so the water stops well inside the heat envelope of the house. Here's a really rough diagram I knocked up to explain it better.

I said it was rough, okay? The brass color is the pipe itself, the silver is the long valve and the rust color is where the water lives. When you unscrew the handle, the valve pulls away from the stop and water flows out. When you close it, any water that's on the left of the valve drains out of the opening and the whole thing stays empty. Since the water stays inside the insulated part of the house (the pink) nothing freezes and everyone's happy. Neat, huh? This works because the water drains out. If you have a hose attached and the water can't drain out, the water stays in the pipe and it will freeze and burst. That's what happened to us. We had to pull this entire piece out and replace it. Generally, there's a screw-in connection so you can just unscrew it and replace it pretty easily. Ours was soldered in for some reason, so we actually had to cut the pipe just past the end of the sillcock and put a new screw-in end on there. This is the cool thing. We used something called "Gator Bites" from Lowe's. They are a life-saver. The angle and close quarters of the location really wouldn't allow for a soldered joint, so we just popped one of these guys on the end of the sillcock, cut the supply line to the right length and then pushed it on. It's working beautifully and saved me $150 on a plumber. We'll see how it holds up. It may not be as great a solution as soldering the pipes, but it certainly worked well for this application. The way it works is that is has little one-way teeth on the inside. When you push it onto the copper pipe, the teeth bite in and won't let you pull it back off. Rubber gaskets inside keep it from leaving. This is the same way that the plastic valves stuck onto the copper pipe. It's sort of an ingenious way to attach a fitting to a pipe, but having them set in cheap plastic is lame while having them in a nice heavy brass (like the one we used) seems brilliant.

Okay, so there's that whole thing. Here's the bonus: We heard a tip about how to get perfect, razor-sharp edges on your paint. We tried it out in the Colonial Room (what used to be the purple room) and it worked like gangbusters. If you've ever taped off a ceiling and noticed that you get paint seeping under the edge and messing up your beautiful work, this will make your day. There are new, expensive painting tapes out there that claim to stop that sort of thing, but I don't trust them. Just do this and save your money.

When you tape off your ceiling (or your lines to make striped or harlequin patterns on your walls) just go over the edge of the tape with the color that's under the tape. That color will seep under the edge of the tape a little and seal it. After it dries, you can paint over that edge with your other color and you will get perfectly clean, beautiful paint lines. Here's a diagram to show you what I'm talking about:

Base color going over the edges of the tape to seal them.

The other color going over the dried base color on top of the tape.

The tape comes off and you have gorgeous, clean lines.

For the ceiling, the tape will be on the surface of the ceiling and you just go and cut in the corner of the ceiling against the wall with the ceiling paint. After it dries, go over it with the wall color and then let that dry. Then remove the tape and be amazed.

Hopefully that made some sort of sense. Also, I hope you like these colors. Because that's what we're doing with every surface on the interior and exterior of the house.

That's it for now! Oddly enough, that only covered one day's worth of work. Needless to say, we're getting a lot done, but there's still a lot to do. I'll keep posting and letting you know how things are going. Please feel free to comment if you have any questions or suggestions or anything.