The Faucet Project

Our kitchen is hideous.
I may have mentioned this before.

The Kohler porcelain fused over cast iron sink is the only thing about our kitchen that I like. Well, I also like the hardwood floor. But I really think the sink is dreamy.

Aren't the steel cabinets just lovely??? They make the loveliest squalling noise when they open too. Historic homes are awesome....but they can be frustrating too. There is no end to the projects and they are never easy fixes. If you have an old house, especially a grand old dame built in 1886 like ours, expect nothing to be easy when fixing or replacing. Any project that you expect to be relatively simple or not take long to do, will automatically be more expensive and take three times as long than you originally thought.

I spend a lot of time scrubbing my sink, with my old friend Bon Ami, because I like it to look sparkly clean. My mother always used Bon Ami to clean the sinks and tubs of our house when I was growing up and I use it too in my own house.  But, this post isn't about kitchen cleansers; it's about that ugly faucet that you can see in these photos. It was put in, no doubt, by the previous owners.....I say that because it's a really cheap and crappy one, which is generally how they did things in this house.  Any "improvements" that they made, we have pretty much ripped out and re-did.  The cheap and crappy faucet has also been broken for some time.

 I've had my eye on this faucet for the longest time at Home Depot. We finally bought it over the weekend and then Erik and his friend Chris worked on it last night. It's so beautiful! I am loving it.

Erik and his friend said "this will only take 20 minutes".....which are famous last words in the context of historic home projects. The 20 minute project took 4 hours and a trip to the hardware store. We knew we'd have to cut a notch in the stool under the window to accomodate this tall faucet and that actually didn't take long. I will be painting it obviously. Someday when we have enough $$ to re-do the kitchen, I want this lovely big window to stay, but the stool will probably come off anyway at that point.

What took the longest was making a hole for this guy.This faucet set came with a sprayer too and we only had 3 holes in the sink, not 4. It took over 2 hours for them to drill through the porcelain outer shell and the cast iron underneath. We also found a date on the bottom of the sink while drilling; 1947, made by Kohler Co, which is right here in Wisconsin. Then they discovered that the braided hose that came with it wasn't long enough, thus the trip to the hardware store. ;-)
But it all worked out in the end and now I have a pretty faucet that works!

Erik also found a few spare moments to put a new dimmer switch in the living room for me.

The one in the living room looked like this one in the dining room; an ugly putty color with a circular knob. The previous owners put these in too; obviously----you can see they didn't even bother to put both screws in and used old, ugly covers.

This is the new one! Yay, so cute! The old one's knob had broken.....so when we went dimmer switch shopping, I wanted this slide style, with an on/off switch. And we found the super cute crown molding styled cover plate which looks very nice with all the crown molding in the house!  Now we'll have to get another for the dining room!


Thanks for stopping by!

I will also be linking this to Metamorphsis Monday at Between Naps on the Porch!