Leaky Shower

Not to get all "hardwarey" with you, but I have to explain something before I can tell my story. When you turn on your shower, the handle actually turns a valve behind it that turns on the water. Probably everyone knows that. At the base of the valve is a rubber washer that sits on something called a seat. When the handle is turned to off, the rubber is compressed against the seat to block the flow of water. With one hundred percent certainty, if the water drips from the shower head when the valve is turned off, the rubber washer or the seat are bad. The fix is to replace one or both. It is a job that is simple, but not always easy. Usually, the valve stem, the part the handle turns, is covered by a flange where it extends into the shower to allow the handle to be attached. It is a finished metal part that trims the plumbing to make it look nice. Sometimes water leaks out from around the valve and runs down the wall of the shower, both inside the shower and worse, behind the wall. This is the stuff of plumbing calamity, because as we all know, leaking water is bad for everything. Ignoring it rarely helps the situation. Bright and early this morning a woman came into the store carrying something in a bag. We see this a lot in the plumbing aisle. People bring stuff they've dissembled in hopes that we can make sense of it. You don't want to actually touch a lot of this stuff and even if you just look into the bag, there is an urge to wash your hands. And sometimes your eyeballs, too. I looked into her bag to find something resembling a stalactite, or a stalagmite, if you turn the bag around. It was her shower handle, which was was frozen to the flange by years of calcification and soap scum. She said it had been leaking for a long time but she only now found out how to remove the handle. I had to put the mess in the vise and smack it to get the handle loose from the flange. The poor woman's theory about what ailed her shower was that she needed a washer in the handle or something. I assured her that it was 'or something' and not the handle causing the leak. I drew her a picture of how to remove the valve and told her to bring it back. She also explained that the shower wall was bugling out. This results from the leak ruining the backing for the tile. Later in the morning she reported back without the valve because she she said her husband couldn't get it loose. Rather than repair the mess, she just soaked her handle and flange in CLR to remove the years of crud. She said that they looked 'real good' and she just put the mess back together. I told her she needed a plumber, but I am positive she won't call one, at least until the wall of the shower collapses. Working in a hardware store gives you an eye into the way people live and it isn't always a pretty sight. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky