I guess I'm not a plumber...

Friday morning before New Years, and I'm standing in the kitchen with the faucet lever in my hand…and the lever's no longer attached to the faucet. Crap…

After a brief conversation with the wife (who was visiting family), I picked up a new faucet at Lowe's (liked their selection better than Home Depot) and brought it home. "This'll be pretty straightforward,' I thought. Right.

The old Moen faucet inlets were two copper tubes which were so close to the nut that held the faucet to the sink that I couldn't get any sort of wrench around the nut to loosen it. I tried two different self-adjusting wrenches and a brand new basin wrench for about 40 minutes, and all I managed to do was work up a sweat and bang my hands around under the sink. OK, that's not going to work.

To give myself more room, I pulled the garbage disposal out at this point, which helped some, but I still couldn't quite get in to the nut. For some reason, it took me this long to realize that the faucet was broken anyway, so it really didn't matter if the inlet tubes were broken off or not - so I broke them off. Unfortunately, they snapped just BELOW the bolt, meaning I STILL couldn't get the basin wrench around the nut. But the smaller adjustable was able to get around the nut and after some gyrations under there, I got the damn thing out.

The new Price Pfister faucet went in (as a co-worker would say) "like buttah!". It looks nice and works well.

So, now I had to put the garbage disposal back in.

Attempt 1, Friday afternoon: Damn thing is leaking! OK, it's not seated right on the cuff. Pull it.
Attempt 2, Friday evening: Damn thing is leaking! OK, it looks like it's seated correctly, and it's not leaking as badly…hmmm. Plug the sink and see if it's leaking from the insert or if there really is a problem. Ok, it appears to be the insert, but I'm too damn tired to do this tonight….tomorrow.
Attempt 3, Saturday morning: Yank the whole unit, including the mounting insert, from the sink and start from scratch. Everything installed again and…ok…looks goo…crap! Damn thing is leaking! Maybe there really is a problem...
Attempt 4, Sunday morning: Yanked the whole shebang AGAIN and started parts. Carefully mounted the insert in the sink and took great pains to ensure that the bracket was tightened evenly. Remounted unit on bracket and reconnected everything…looks good…whew!

Three days, and I have my sink back. It looks like the initial problem was when I first remounted the unit, I pushed up on the bracket too hard, damaging the putty seal between the sink and the insert. When I completely reinstalled on Saturday, I didn't take the necessary care to ensure that the insert was evenly tightened, and I screwed up the seal again. Lesson learned. I got frustrated started rushing to get the job finished. I'd done this before and not had problems, so clearly I wasn't part of the problem this time either. Yeah, right...