A Two Tripper

I judge any home project in terms of how many trips to the hardware store it takes to accomplish it.

We haven't started remodeling the bar in the basement yet.

WHAT?!!

Yes, after all the other stuff wraps up we have one more fairly sizable project left to tackle. To say I am dreading it would be a colossal understatement.

We did go ahead and buy the fridge for that space.

The delivery guys weren't amused when they learned they had to get that thing down the steps.

And like everything else in this epic journey it eventually found a way to turn into a hassle. Weeks ago we had our friend Jim run a water line for the ice maker over from the nearby bathroom sink. (The bar sink is closer, but it's not really feasible to get a water line from there to where the fridge goes.) Since there was nothing to hook it up to he went ahead and mounted it, but didn't take the step of puncturing the water pipe and finishing it off.

This was further complicated by the fact that the delivery guys didn't even have the fitting required to connect the fridge to the water line Jim ran.

First trip to hardware store: Find this fitting, and hopefully avoid buying the entire $30 kit to get a $2 fitting. They didn't really have one, but a very helpful store employee helped me cobble one together out of miscellaneous stuff they did have. Cool!

However, upon clamping down the valve at the sink water line we ran into a complication...

This was mostly our fault...I recently broke a couple of ribs playing basketball so it's extremely painful for me to get down into small spaces to do things like this, so Liane did it. We punctured through the pipe as planned (though we weren't exactly sure when), but then in the course of expecting water to flow  she kept cranking the valve, which eventually broke. It was just after this I realized that the clockwise rotation, while being correct for initially breaking through the pipe, was also shutting the valve off for water flow. Jim hadn't left all that detail in his instructions because I'm sure he thought it was obvious. And once I thought about it for more than two seconds it pretty much was. Too late. I have zero plumbing skills so I was apprehensive about this going in. And I was right.

Second trip to hardware store: Try to find a new valve, again without having to buy the whole $30 kit. (It's not the $30, you know....it's the principle -- it's a contest of sorts.)

The new valve had a larger clamp, so it wouldn't fit into the space correctly. When it was lined up with the hole already made by the first valve the bracket on the backside that holds it to the pipe wouldn't fit -- it was hitting the wall. So...we'll use the bracket from the old valve. Not ideal, but doable.

Upon turning the water back on and opening the valve we discovered the fitting at the fridge was leaking pretty bad, and no water was coming out of the fridge. Sigh...

Turn water off, take that joint apart. Not exactly sure why it's leaking, but several similar looking parts had come with the new valve so I thought I'd try a few of those. It turns out the helpful hardware store guy hadn't sold me exactly the right stuff. In fact, upon sorting through the leftover parts from the valve (second trip) I actually had everything I needed for the fitting (first trip) right there.

Oh well, we got it working, even if I do have some leftover, redundant stuff.