In Which Our Heroine Succeeds
Ah, finally. I'm here. I've been trying to post for a couple weeks now, but there is some sort of compatibility issue between the new software and the new computer. So let's see where to start....

Adventures in Plumbing!
Aha! I have a great new landlady. Unlike our old one, who wouldn't even fix our doorbell when it was broken for weeks on end and we lived on the third floor (we fixed it in the end and took it off our rent), never mind things like the stove or the holes in teh linoleum, my shiny bouncy new landlady is not just willing to fix immediately, she's willing to upgrade. The shower head I brought (so that I can fit under to wash my hair) from three moves now was starting to leak at the joints, so on the condition I would leave it when I moved, she bought me a new one. A *better* one than I had. She's also re-done our floors, and when the sink started to leak from the top (it was very old) she bought a new one to replace it. I offered to install it.

This is where I went wrong. Now, in my landlady's defence, she offered to get a plumber. Heck, I was given the ability to call a plumber the second I didn't want to do this. But everything I read said that this was a relatively easy thing to do. Of course, everything I read also said that the trickiest bit about it was getting the old faucet OUT first. And this proved to be far too true. Gosh. And gosh again! Oh, the effort it took to get that thing out. The nuts would not budge. I even called Kit in the middle of it to say "Look, I've sprayed them with WD-40, what else can I do?" to which the answer seemed to be "Let's just double check you're trying to turn them the right way (I was, thankfully) and then just apply the force.

Force was applied. Unfortunately, the nuts were so firmly on there that the pipe stabilizing it at the top broke off so the nuts were now on a freely spinning bolt, but the faucet was still not going to come out. Kit had told me what I would have to do in this case, which was cut the bolt through. I could use a jigsaw, provided I had a hacksaw blade on it. A quick trip to Home Depot later, the blade was on. In the end, I was down on my knees grateful for the electric jigsaw - the pipe turned out to be so thick it was hard enough to cut with the jig - I can only imagine how much it would have taken to do it by hand!

Once the old faucet was out, the new faucet was put in. That part took ten minutes.

Then it took half an hour to clean up, mop the water off teh floor, put my sopping wet clothes in the laundry (I had, in fact, finished the job off topless as I refused to drench another shirt. WHo knew plumbing was so erotic?) and get on the sofa and refuse to budge!