If I have to, I can do anything

Though I had put the new Nine Inch Nails album, With Teeth, on my stereo just before I began my postmodern plumbing project on Saturday afternoon — after my first of four trips to Home Depot and my first consultation with the man who was to become my personal plumbing associate, Aziz — what I was hearing in my mind as I cleared out the Tupperware containers from the cupboard under the sink, and searched for the T-stop with which to shut off the main water supply, was Helen Reddy's I Am Woman.

I know, I know, women can plumb just as good as men. It's just that not any of the women I know do, and I myself never have. I've done plenty of electrical work. Gotten my hands dirty under the hood of my car. I've even laid bricks and done drywall. Oh, and once I sanded a floor, but that's a job I now place on the list of home renovations it's worth it to pay someone else to do for you.

My townhouse is four years old and was marketed on the basis of certain upgrades, like granite kitchen floors, marble countertops, and "hardwood" floors. I qualify the word hardwood with quotation marks because the stuff is actually cardboard laminated with a razor thin layer of wood that sounds hollow when you walk on it. Better than cheap carpeting, but hardwood it isn't.

I love my condo and I especially love the master bathroom, which has a separate shower stall, a large, oval soaker tub, and 428 shiny white tiles on the walls. Yes, I've counted. The floor is black tile and the countertop is black marble with white swirls, and most of the wall above it is mirror. There's only a couple of square feet of paintable surface in the room, and painting it with a glossy white oil-based paint will be one of my projects another day.

But all the faucets are cheap crap. My bathtub should have sleek white fixtures, and one day I want a black toilet in there. But what's been bothering me the most in my home these days, like a microscopic sliver your tweezers can't seem to grab, is the cheap ass kitchen faucet, a single lever contraption made by a company called Price Pfister, a brand I will never buy ever in my life when I get to choose fixtures, and which, Gentle Reader, if you are renovating or building a new bathroom or kitchen I recommend you put on your black list. The handle's sensitivity began weakening after I'd lived there only six months, and it continuted to deteriorate until, for the past year, my faucet has had only two positions: off, and full-blast on.

Price Pfister. Remember it. Avoid it.

When I woke up on Saturday morning I decided this would be the day I toss that Price Pfister crapola faucet into the dumpster and become Postmodern Plumbing Sass. I can do it. If I have to. And I want to.

So off to Home Depot I went, to consult with Aziz, my personal plumbing associate. I learned that faucets range in price from $50 to $400. Aziz told me, god bless him, that for $20 I could buy something called a cartridge that would fix my faucet problem. I thanked him for that, but informed him that I'd already decided to hate my Price Pfister faucet with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, and today I wanted a pretty shiny new faucet, please.

He said he'd be happy to sell me one.

We looked at the display of 156 faucets from five manufacturers and he gave me the overview of features, and what differentiates a high quality faucet from the cheapo crap like Price Pfister (have I mentioned what a piece of shit my came-with-the-condo kitchen faucet was?). When I asked which brand he'd recommend, he said American Standard is the best, and Moen is also very good. He never mentioned Price Pfister.

I asked, will I be able to do this myself? Without having to call a plumber?

"You can do it," said Aziz. "And we can help."

I wonder whether the executives at Home Depot realize the marketing power their associates have.

I decided on a Moen faucet. The model name is Banbury, and it cost $169. Isn't it gorgeous? There's a black rubber button on the top of the spout which, when you press it, turns the water stream into a showering spray. And you can pull out the spout to use it as a remote sprayer.

Allow me to pause for a moment to say, Moen beautiful. Moen lovely. Moen faucets, I want to kiss you and pet you and sleep with you under my pillow. Moen, I love your products. I wish I could act in a Home Depot commercial showing how I installed my new kitchen faucet; my new, beautiful, shiny, polished chrome finish Moen faucet, all by myself.

And it only took me seven hours over two days and four trips to Home Depot.

Two hours into day one of the postmodern plumbing project, with my water shut off and the hot and cold water connections detached, as I lay upside down under my kitchen counter, looking up at the double sink which, from this angle, looked for all the world like two giant boobs, I realized that I lacked the tool that would be able to unscrew the hexagonal bolt that fastened the faucet to the counter, as it protruded directly between the boobs and permitted no radius within which to turn the adjustable wrench I'd been using to disconnect everything up to that point.

So I had to abort the mission to attend Naked KnitGirl's I Am Canadian party. I re-connected the water, took a shower, put on my red suit, pinned a Canadian flag to my lapel, and, for good measure, stuffed the Moen installation instructions into my purse. You never know when you might meet a plumber at a party.

Or, say, an engineer. I asked Donny if I could borrow his ratchet set, which got him started on a rant about metric vs. imperial, blah blah blah, and it took him half an hour to realize I wasn't inquiring because I wanted to work on my car.

"Oh, plumbing!" he said. "What is it you're trying to do?"

So I showed him the instructions, and pointed out in the diagrams where I was having trouble.

He opined that a ratchet set might not be the right tool for that job, and that my best bet was to go back to Home Depot. And then he explained best practices for double wrenching when loosening pipe connections, and presented a formidable argument justifying why a fixed width wrench was better than an adjustable wrench.

There's something I like about Donny, in spite of all my woman's intuition and just plain common sense to the contrary. I don't quite know how to explain it to you, Gentle Reader, unless you, too, are the kind of person who, when going to the pound to choose a new pet, is drawn to the mangiest, homliest, scraggliest dawg in the bunch because it wags its tail with more enthusiasm than any ten of the more sophisticated breeds surrounding it, and because you know that if you don't love it no one else ever will and it will end up being put to death and you can't bear to see that happen.

It's something like that.

There were a lot of bloggers at the party, and most of them had cameras. That's me in my red suit (with white go-go boots, of course), with Maria, watching Joey do Sloan's Underwhelmed. A fine, fine Canadian song. And this is part of me, holding Sharkey and feeding him a Timbit.

Sharkey was the life of the party. He's a character on Blamblog's blog.
Upstairs at Maria's, after the condo cops booted us out of the party room, a few of us diehards hung out. There was Donny, Blamb, Karen, JB, and Maria; the leftover beer, and one slice of tortiere. I don't know what happened to the penis-shaped Timbit. Then Maria said, "Let's go to my bedroom with Sharkey," and that's when I decided it was time to go home.

* * *
Next, the story, in two parts, of Sunday's three trips to Home Depot to finish the postmodern plumbing project. In the first part, Sass's doorbell rings while she's got her head under the sink and, since she knows who it is, she considers keeping it there.