New Shower Faucet and Sprayer

We forget to take our camera to the boat so we'll have to post pictures later.  One of the things we've wanted to do on the boat was change out the shower head (it is a handheld sprayer) and faucet (to go from two handles to one).  I ordered all the bits and pieces before Christmas and they have slowly trickled in.  We got the last piece, the shower head, last week.  We'd had the new faucet and mixer valve for a few weeks so we'd already been to OSH to by all the parts to hook it up, then decided to return all those parts and buy different parts at West Marine that we thought would work better with the plastic hoses we have.  All we needed was a hole saw.  The instructions said 2 1/2'" to 3 1/4 so we asked around the dock and came up with a 3" one we could borrow.  When we took apart the existing faucet we realized that due to the thickness of the wall we actually needed a 5" hole saw.  So again we asked around. And asked around. and then went to buy one.  We also realized that we needed some different sized connectors than what we had as the hose was smaller than we thought.  So off to West Marine and OSH again.  Return this, buy that...

Matt had to run over to a friend's house to borrow a driver for the hole saw since we bought the wrong one so I got the new sprayer installed while he was gone.  After some trial and error and confusion over the instructions (no words, just pictures) we got everything done and we turned the water pressure back on.... and water shot everywhere from our connections at the back of the valve.  It was 5pm Saturday and we were ready to give up and attack it again Sunday.  However one of our friends came over at just that point and he and Matt spent another hour trouble shooting.  They decided the Shur Flo connectors weren't compatible with the other connectors we were using and there was no way to get them to work.  So we came up with a Plan Q or whatever letter we were on at that point and made a list of what we needed at West Marine on Sunday. 

This meant we had no water pressure on the boat overnight.  I can't tell you how many times I walked up to the sink expecting it to work.  The worst was when I'd squirt soap on my hands and then try the faucet.  DANG IT, outside to the spigot to wash my hands, AGAIN.

So Sunday morning I headed off to West Marine for the 32nd time, list in hand.  Got all the pieces and parts and back to the boat.  The final assembly was really not too bad.  The existing water hoses were really hard to get on to the connector barbs but we found if we heated them with the blow dryer before inserting the barb they were much easier to put together.  The only negative was the new arrangement involved about ten hose clamps.  Those suckers are SHARP and Matt cut his fingers up on them.  But we did get it all together and NO LEAKS.  At least on the back side, inside the wall.  The old faucet was leaking into the storage area under the settee so we are really happy this new is LEAK FREE.  Now in the shower side... we had a couple of leaks where I hadn't tightened things enough and Matt was easily able to take care of those.  We couldn't get a small leak to stop where the handheld sprayer attached into the water saving thing, even with reapplication of plumbers tape.  We decided it was minor enough that we would "live with it."  It was so late by the time we got all this done that we have not actually TRIED it yet, but it sure LOOKS like an improvement! 

From there we got the dinghy out onto its trailer using our new hitch on Matt's new car, but that is a whole story onto itself!