Saturday morning I headed to the local Home Depot to find a new kitchen faucet. The model that I wanted (I needed one with a white finish, and they had only three) couldn’t be found. The inventory system showed six remaining, but the attendant couldn’t figure out where they were. So, I was off to the other Home Depot in Woodland Hills (the earlier one was in Canoga Park). Chatsworth had the model I wanted in stock – but way at the top of the aisle, so I had to wait to be helped.

I took my new purchase home and got to work. It was tough getting the old faucet out of there – but soon enough I had it out and the new one all plopped down in place.

Then it was time to hook up the water lines.

ummm…

right….

uh…..

hmmmm…. this doesn’t look right…

After I took apart the connections from the previous faucet it became obvious that I was not going to have a straight up 3/8 connection to hook up to the new faucet.

Here you can see the valve and the snipped pipe in one shot.

I took photos of my predicament and went back to the same Home Depot. The on-hand plumber said the best thing to do would be to replace the hot and cold water valves. When I informed him that I was in a condo and couldn’t easily do that he set me up with $20 worth of copper connector pieces and plumbers putty.

I hurried home and got to work (this was already taking WAY longer than I had planned).

I diligently hooked everything up -applied putty to the threads and so on…

turned the water just a crack…

gurgle – pfissssssssssssssss

water quickly began dribbling out of the make-shift connection.

I took it apart and brought everything back to the original Home Depot for a second opinion.

This time the “plumber” said that the plastic pieces I was showing him he’d “never seen before” – and when I showed him a photo on my camera of the copper piping he proclaimed “yeah, somebody messed with that thing, even the copper piping is supposed to be threaded at the end – you got a custom job on your hands.. you gotta call a plumber I can’t help you with that – I never even seen them things before.”

This was the old set up, plastic tubing coming into plastic connectors.

Here is a shot of the hot water valve. It appears to have a 3/8 connection on the bottom (for the dishwasher) but the top (as with the cold valve) is just copper piping snipped at the end.

Great. So I finally decided to “man-up” and tackle a home improvement myself only to find out that the previous owner had messed everything up and only a plumber can fix it. Well, technically I could fix it myself by installing new valves if I had a house. But I don’t have a house. I have a condo and the HOA told me yesterday that I’ll have to wait till next week to get the HOA authorized plumber to schedule a time to shut off the water – because there aren’t individual unit shut-offs. So I’ll have to shut off the water supply for 70 condos just to install a new faucet….

Give me a break. So, I can’t wash any dishes until “some time this week.”