Fixing an Outside Faucet

Over the weekend I had plans to change out the faucet outside that would leak when we turned it on… and by “leak” I mean gush tons of water, creating a river on the side of our house.   I allocated about an hour to complete the job but thought it’d only take about 30 minutes to do.  The tools I used was a monkey wrench, screw driver, pliers, and plumbers tape.   It’s a pretty simple task.  Spray some Liquid Wrench on the fixture to loosen up the calcium build up, unscrew the old faucet, place plumber’s tape on the treading of the pipe and then tighten up the new faucet and call it a day.  Simple enough, right?  WRONG!

The idiots that built the house decided to weld the copper piping directly to the faucet.  When I began to “unscrew” the old faucet, I was actually ripping the pipe behind the wall.  After realizing that the faucet wasn’t coming off, I dismantled the faucet and took a peek inside the pipe… I saw light, which confirmed that my guerrilla strength ripped the copper pipe inside the wall.  So what did we do next?  Well my Dad and I busted a hole in the wall to see wassup.    We determined that we had to make a clean cut on the copper pipe from the wall, weld an extension pipe to it, weld a threaded piece to that and then screw on the new faucet.  My 1 hour job just turned into a half a day’s work!

Luckily, Home Depot is a stone’s throw from my house.  Even luckier, Derek that works in the plumbing department is super knowledgable and helpful.  He walked us through each step to fix the problem.  So pops and I grabbed what we needed (mini copper pipe cutter, 1/2 inch copper piping, couplers and a threaded extension).  Dad and I measured, cut and pieced everything together, but then we came to the step of welding the piece we created to the actual pipe in the wall.  That’s where we had to call the pros… Since sheet rock was right behind the brick wall, I didn’t want to burn my house down doing it myself, so Biju Uncle from my church came through and welded all the parts I needed together.  After that was the moment of truth… I turned on the water main…. NO LEAKS!  Everything works fine.  Now all I need to do is some minor masonry work and it’ll be good as new.  In the mean time I just placed a brink so critters don’t try to sneak in.  I shelled out about $30 for this project, which beats paying a plumber $80 just to look at the problem… so I’m happy.

Although it took half of my Saturday and I missed a crawfish broil, I’m glad I did it.  I enjoy doing this kinda stuff around the house, and it also gave my pops and I some time to just hang together… I’ve got some other fun projects to do around the house, so hopefully no other immediate fixes come up that will divert my time.