I have always thought the builder’s grade basic faucets in my bathrooms were gross, but I didn’t want to bother with finding a plumber (or getting “Uncle” Dan to come all the way here) to have them replaced. Additionally, since I thought replacing the faucets would be a huge deal, I figured I’d wait until I could redo the whole bathroom (NOTE: This is not happening any time soon).
Original faucet (BEFORE!):
In the past year or so, I’ve learned a little bit of super-basic plumbing in figuring out how to fix a slow bathroom drain and when I super-clogged the kitchen drain being a bad garbage disposal user (twice). I watched some youtube videos and decided I could totally replace the faucets myself. I ordered one faucet, in brushed chrome, from efaucets.com. I thought I’d just start with the one and see how it went before committing to doing both.
I took out the old faucet and then (after being grossed out and quite frustrated several times) finally got the old drain out. I ran into some problems that several confused trips to home improvement stores solved in the course of putting the new stuff in, but eventually, I got everything installed successfully. EXCEPT! Upon standing back to admire my beautiful new faucet, I noticed (and could not unsee) that the drain and the faucet were different colors (!):
The faucet was the brushed chrome that I ordered, but the drain was brushed nickel. The parts had come in one Kohler box with Kohler seals on it, and I was so focused on figuring out what the hell I was doing that I didn’t notice the mismatch before I installed both parts. As you can imagine, I could not deal with these things not matching. I contacted efaucets.com, and they told me that I needed to talk to Kohler. I contacted Kohler via their website (so that I could send a picture of the mismatch), and they sent out a new drain assembly to me right away, free of charge and without having to send the mismatched one back (I could not be more pleased with how this was handled).
In the mean time, I decided that I rather liked the way the brushed nickel drain looked, and I also decided that in no way did I want to take the drain that I had already installed out, so the second faucet that I ordered was brushed nickel. I took the brushed chrome faucet out of my bathroom, and I replaced it with the new brushed nickel one. Here’s a picture once the mismatch in my bathroom was resolved with the second new faucet:
The brushed chrome faucet and the chrome drain that Kohler sent me to match it went in the hall bathroom. That installation went soooo much better than the first since I knew what the hell I was doing (relatively). Admire:
A bonus to this is that I have an extra brushed nickel drain assembly that I can try to sell on the interwebs…assuming it’s possible someone would need just a drain, I could make upwards of $40!!
I’m super excited about having done this, even though it turns out that replacing faucets is pretty easy and definitely not the big deal I thought it was. I thought it was kind of fun.
(Also, one-handle faucets are the best faucets. That is all.)