Home Improvements

Are faucets really a thing people get excited about? I replaced the builders grade crap in my kitchen with slightly better and much more functional Lowes crap when I replaced the countertops. The main one in the kitchen started dripping, and I’m sure can just get a replacement valve, but is there a hot new kitchen faucet I should be going for that I can’t live without?

People get excited for everything. They have those new touchless faucets, presumably someone, somewhere, is really into faucet tech.

Me? I hate the cheap faucets, because when I’m trying to shower or whatever, sometimes I want it 3° warmer. And those cheap-o faucets, you twist the knob 2° towards hot and it gets 19° hotter, and I hate that. So that, and I want a faucet that’ll almost certainly not fail, or have the finish falling off, for like 40 years. And yeah, I do want it to look nice.

I spent about 2k on Moen fixtures when I remodeled our master bath. That was everything including faucetsx3, valves, shower heads x3, shower handlesx2, a new toilet handle to match the faucets, and grab bars. It was Moen, and it was brushed nickel finish.

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Not according to him and he has worked with all of them. He doesn’t like the brand. :woman_shrugging:

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have a delta kitchen faucet. handle came off. no good replacement available. so frustrating.

Yeah I think Delta is a brand hated more than Kohler. :grimacing:

My brief research on r/plumbing suggests that Moen is slightly preferred over Kohler and Delta. With a caveat that all of them make the $59 faucets you can get at Lowe’s, and more expensive lines that are maybe made from solid brass and have different valves etc.

Honestly, our last house had builder-grade faucets from 1996 that were still serviceable. They looked cheap, and you couldn’t adjust the temp well at all, but perhaps we’re at a point where reliability is pretty good across the board.

It seems what’s probably the biggest thing for me is that we’re committed to polished brass, which cuts down my options A LOT. The brushed gold look is in, but polished brass hasn’t been cool since 1992.

Just needs a bit of paint touch up, we stripped the window parts and baseboards back to bare wood and stained them. I’m not done with the rest of the room but I’ve stripped nearly all the paint so it’s moving reasonably quickly now. Except the pocket doors, lots of nooks and crannies for paint to hide in.

I’m not stripping the paint from the sash. Too much work and some parts aren’t in good enough shape. Next year I will have them all rebuilt and re-painted white. And I’m going to build wooden storms for them.

There’s a special place in hell for whoever painted all of this amazing oak.

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I love your house.

I do love old houses, even if they are a royal pain to keep up with. We are trying to be respectful of the house and the architecture as we maintain and update things. As they say, we don’t own the house, we’re just looking after it for a while.

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Who are “they”? Goblins?

Old house nerds. Like the folks on r/centuryhomes

The first house I bought as a 20 something was a 2 BR post WWII ranch in the burbs. Cute little house. Built in 1950 and in 1994 I bought it from it’s original owner! A widow who had lived there most all of her adult life. Raised one son.

When we went in to paint - on the inside of the coat closet door was a growth chart for her son. Went from about 2’, marked each year until it went up over 6’.

All of that to say: We never painted over the inside of that door. It belonged to the house.

Hopefully it’s still there and more children have been added. :slight_smile:

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Should have tracked down the kid and gave the door to him/her.

I figured if they wanted it, they would have taken it. :woman_shrugging:

If we had replaced it, I’d have at least tried to ask if they wanted it before throwing it away.

My daughter bought a house built in the 60s from the original owners that hadn’t been renovated. They actually got it at a cheaper price than another offer because the owner wanted it to be sold to a family not an investor.

We had door trim with our kids height on it through the years but it had to go in the kitchen Reno. I regret it, but no choice.

We also had a room in the basement the kids used to party in when they were teens. It got named as ‘The Drunk Tank’. Someone wrote that on the door with a marker, and it devolved from there. It ended up being a complete crude graffiti display, lot of memories of neighourhood kids.
We took it with us when we moved. When we moved back, I got tired of trucking a door around. Kids didn’t want it, so I sent it to the dump.
What didn’t get lost was our second fridge. At the same time the drunk tank was operational, one of the kids friends wrote ‘Perrin’s beer’ on a shelf on the fridge, in permanent marker. That’s still there. Except now it’s SL’s beer kept there.
Also when we moved back into this place, we repainted the drunk tank. I’m painting way up in the corner, behind the cabinet that holds the electrical box. Right up by the ceiling there someone had drawn a tiny penis. Must’ve taken some effort, and it was unnoticed for years.

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The former owner of our current house asked our realtor if we were ‘old house people’ or ‘new house people,’ presumably because they didn’t want it turned into a sea of greige by a flipper.

Our second house is where we raised young kids. We extended the concrete patio in the back to accommodate a hot tub. Let the kids put their hand prints in a corner.

A few years later the new owners asked the neighbor to contact me to see if I wanted that chunk of concrete (I guess they were tearing it out). I says yes but it never happened. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Another old house owner here. The house has had 17 owners over almost 100 years. I expect it will have more after us, as this isn’t the kind of house you can die of old age in (second story bedroom and bathroom).

So it definitely does feel like it has its own identity and we can never really own it.