The Cost of Being Cheap
I’ve realized it takes a lot of time, money and hard work to be a world-class cheap ass.
For example, the faucet in my bathroom has been leaking for – I don’t know – about five years give or take a year. The cheap man’s solution to a leaky faucet is to completely ignore the problem, which I did successfully for the past five years. But recently the leak turned from a slow drip into something more akin to Niagara Falls, so I decided this problem finally needed some attention.
Now I am no plumber (unless you count the ability to clog a toilet) but after a little research on the Internet (aka the cheap man’s enabler) I saw that leaky faucets can often be fixed by replacing the “seats and springs“, which is basically a rubber gasket with a spring that sits inside the faucet’s handles.
Now the cheap man gets excited about a fix that is going to cost him a few dollars instead of the obscene amount it would cost to get new faucet, so after consuming a few Youtube videos on the topic, I jumped right in and began to take my faucet apart.
And, of course, I ran into my first problem immediately upon starting – I had no idea what brand of faucet this was.
My bathroom faucet is a nondescript item; made of cheap chrome and cheaply designed in such a way that if I had to guess, it retailed for around $5 in 1987. There was no indication of the manufacturer anywhere on the outside (probably by design since no one would want to be associated with this piece of crap) and was generic looking enough that it was impossible for me to track down even with the help of the internet.
The closest representation I could find online was this thing of beauty from Kingston Brass (although mine had different handles and was clearly an older model):
But this small problem was not enough to slow me down. I had removed the seat and spring from the hot water handle*. I could simply go to one of those big box home retailers and match up the old seat and spring with a new one from the store using my keen powers of observation.
Not surprisingly, that failed. Despite having a wall dedicated to seats, springs and various other faucet repair products, neither of the two stores in my area had seats and springs that looked anything like the one I pulled from my faucet.**
While my first attempt at identifying the faucet turned up empty, I had read online that faucets can sometimes have their identifying information stamped on the bottom. I was hesitant to completely disconnect the faucet and pull it out on the small chance that the brand was somewhere underneath, but I was getting desperate.
After disconnecting and removing the faucet, the only thing I found was about five pounds of plumber’s putty stuffed up inside it. The bottom was complete devoid of any information about the manufacturer or the brand. Or maybe it had been there at one time only to have been assimilated by plumber’s putty in the intervening years.
At this point, with the faucet completely removed, the cheap man inside of me broke down and asked my wife if we should just buy an entirely new faucet. While this idea cut against my core beliefs, my wife had been bugging me for a while to replace that faucet*** and I had just done half of the labor involved in putting a new one in.
Not surprisingly she said yes, so I ran out to the store and bought the cheapest faucet I could find, an AquaSource Two-Handle WaterSense for $25 on clearance. It wasn’t until I got home that I started reading reviews and discovered why it was on clearance – it’s apparently a leaky piece of junk.
Now I may be cheap, but I’m not a complete idiot****, so instead of installing the faucet and having it leak on me within the year, turned to the Internet again and ordered a Price Pfister faucet online that received better reviews (and sadly, was more expensive). There was one small problem, however, the faucet was a special order item and had to be ordered and shipped from the warehouse. Approximate arrival date – 4 to 10 business days.
A total lack of sink in the primary bathroom is perfectly acceptable for me (I can just brush my teeth in the kitchen sink, see problem solved), but it’s an inconvenience for most normal people, so I reinstalled the old faucet temporarily until the new one arrived. After hooking everything back up, I realized why an entire drum of plumbers putty was stuck all up in the old faucet – it leaks like crazy from the bottom without it.
Damn.
So I’m currently without the use of a faucet in my bathroom while I wait for my new faucet to arrive. And a $2 set of faucet seats and springs slowly and painfully turned into a new faucet. Approximate cost of this fix in time and money:
New faucet – $50
Plumbing materials – $4
Number of trips to the store for parts – 3
Hours spent uninstalling and reinstalling an old faucet that doesn’t work and will eventually need to be removed again – At least 2
Number of Youtube videos watched on leaky faucet repair – At least 10
Time spent researching faucet repair on the internet – Way too damn long
Number of bathroom sinks that currently work – 0
Like I said, it takes a lot of hard work to be this cheap.
More on repairing a faucet leak
Video on how to fix a leaky faucet
***
*It was a two handle sink and the hot water side was leaking, which apparently is the more common side to start leaking first.
**This is the point where I could have went to a plumbing supply shop and begged for help if there was one in my area.
***In her defense, it is a butt-ugly faucet that was leaking.
****Just a partial idiot.
