faucet fix'd

We had a plumbing crisis a few days ago. I have a tub/shower in my bathroom, and the little gadget for shutting off the tub water and making it come out of the shower instead has long been sticking and acting up.

And then one day the entire faucet fixture fell apart and came off in my hand.

It was at this point that I discovered that tub faucets are not fastened to the wall. A water pipe extends several inches out from the wall with a screw thread on the end. This screws onto a thread on the inside of the faucet fixture.

OK, that looks easy. To the hardware store to buy a tub faucet fixture. They only sell kits: the faucet, the control handle, the shower head. OK, I could use a new shower head too: the old one tended to dribble.

Brought it home, tried to screw on the faucet fixture. It wouldn't screw on.

Call a plumber. He couldn't do it either, nor could the other plumber from the same outfit whom he called to replace him with greater skill. It took the third plumber, who had to wield a blowtorch (!) to remove the old screw thread from the end of the pipe and solder on a new one, to get this to work.

But victory was ours, and he replaced the shower head too. (He could not, however, figure out that you had to pull, not rotate, the handle to turn the water on.)

As soon as he left, I took my first shower in three days (I'd been subsisting on sponge baths), and - considering how badly the old shower head worked - my first really satisfactory shower since the last time I stayed in a hotel room a month ago. Bliss.