A Leaky Bath Fixture Odyssey

The odyssey actually began about a year ago when the old bath fixture began to leak.  I could ignore it for awhile by pulling the shower curtain closed.  The drip, drip, drip sound could be temporarily silenced by redirecting the flow away from the tub spout but after awhile the water reached the shower head and made an even louder drop, drop, drop.

Eventually, my conscience got the better of me.  I was brought up in a hardware store after all. So I tried the quick solution of just replacing the valve stem in the original fixture but the plumbing gods were not going to let me off that easy.  The old stem refused to budge.  If just the stem was not going to come out, then the whole fixture was going to have to come out.  This is where the saws came out.

After excavating thru ceramic tile that was glued to half inch cement wallboard I exposed the work to be done.  In the back of my mind, I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to deal with the 12″ x 18″ hole I had just created in the wall that but this was no time to fret over small details.
Notice the two strands of 12 gauge Romex wire strung behind the copper supply lines.  I’m lucky my saws never made it that far or this would have been an obituary instead of a plumbing journal.

Cutting the hot and cold supply lines, and the pipe leading up to the shower head and removing the old bath valve was easy enough.  I had to cut them several more times in my various attempts at making a leak proof connection to the new bath valve.

An accomplished plumber would have no problem soldering 1/2″ copper pipe to various sweat fittings in this confined and flammable space.  I ended up using flexible tubing with threaded fittings that have a slip-on no-solder required connection to 1/2″ copper pipe.  This turned out to be several times as expensive but it doesn’t leak.  I’ll save learning to solder copper fittings for another day.

The new valve is not physically attached to the infrastructure behind the wall.  The flexible supply lines provide a lot of adjustment in where and how the bath valve would attach to the future wall.

So the time came to address the issue with the gaping hole in the wall.  I considered painting everything in site in primary colors, covering the whole thing in clear Plexiglas and calling it modern art.  About this time, Kathy was making noises about looking up plumbers in the phone book so I decide not to push my luck with her sense of art appreciation.

Through several iterations of measuring and marking and measuring again and marking again, I crafted a piece of 1/2″ AC plywood to fit snugly into the void I had created and even cut holes for the bath valve and tub filler spout that matched that of the plumbing.  Before installing said plywood, I sealed both sides and all exposed edges with Thomson Water Seal and painted the room-facing side with three coats of white oil based enamel.  While that was drying,  I glued thin wooden braces across the inside corners of the void as backstops for the new plywood wall.

Finally, I drilled and screwed the painted plywood into place with the bath valve and assorted chrome finishing pieces attached.    When it was fully installed, the plywood sat about a quarter of an inch back from the surface of the existing ceramic tile and left an unsightly mismatch between the edges of the two materials.

The last step was to cover this ugly gap.  I iterated through a couple of experiments with plastic trim meant for other applications. Eventually I came upon a slightly off-white plastic molding with an “L” cross section. (One can spend an awful long time just comparing various kinds of molding and trim in Home Depot.)  This molding fit across the ceramic tile and down to the painted plywood, successfully hiding all of the rough edges where the two met.  With some more careful measuring and cutting and a little remedial almond colored silicon seal, I completed the installation.

If one were to look closely, there is a gap of about 3/4″ between the wall end of the tub filler spout and the painted plywood wall.  It is almost indistinguishable as a white PVC plastic fitting, neatly crafted to the required size, blends in with the rest of the wall and disguises an earlier measurement error.

So I have fixed the dripping bath fixture, learned a few more skills, and will no doubt explain exactly how it should be done to the plumber next time.

-jgp