When we moved into our house there was a nice new dishwasher under the counter. Unfortunately it was not hooked up, and even more unfortunately our under-sink plumbing did not have the attachments for running the water lines. Which has also meant that our new refrigerator didn’t have water for drinking or ice making. 🙁

The plumbing for the sink in these old houses runs straight up inside the wall and then makes a 90 degree bend and comes straight out the wall and into the faucet. Newer plumbing comes out under the sink at a shut off valve and the a hose brings water from the valve up to the sink. Well since we wanted to keep the original faucet, we decided to add a T in the lines in the wall and add a set of shut off valves.

The wall was already cut open from my garbage disposal installation (see previous post) and so I already had access to the pipes. Installing these valves was a simpe matter of shutting off the water to the house, cutting the supply lines and removing the top section. Then using a screw-tighten coupler, I added the T and new top section without having to cut new pipe threads on the lower section. No problem. 😀

This will all be replaced with new copper tubing when we do the plumbing for the bathrooms.

Yay, dishwasher! Yay, ice maker! Yay, cold filtered water! Yay, sink sprayer!

Our house came with a few uninstalled ‘goodies’, one of which was this massive garbage disposer. Pretty much the largest food macerator I’ve even seen. Installing the lump onto the bottom of the sink was no problem. But once I went to hook up the P-trap a thought crossed my mind: “So that’s why they didn’t install it.” The drain inlet at the wall was too high. If I had tried to make it work as it was, then our disposer would have never drained of liquid. 🙁

So the only option left was to move the drain inlet which, after some research, I concluded wasn’t that uncommon for disposer installation in older houses.