Faucets and Swollen Hands

Ann was gone this morning picking up Monica from church camp so I thought that I would get some work done around the house. More specifically, we have an outdoor faucet in the front of our house that has a bad habit of dripping if it is not closed very very tightly so I thought that I would try to fix this.

My idea was to try to take the faucet apart and see if I could find and fix the problem though I wasn't exactly sure if I knew what I was doing. The first thing that I did was shut off the water in our basement so that I could work on the outdoor faucet. Once this was done (even this was harder than it should have been due to a very tight faucet handle on the pipe coming into our house) I attempted to take apart the dripping outdoor faucet using a couple of large wrenches. This didn't go so well and I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing so my next approach was to go see if I could find the right way to do it. This of course meant getting out my laptop and doing a google search on fixing dripping outdoor faucets. This was very fruitful and I had a few videos from YouTube to choose from that showed how to do this. I randomly chose one of the videos and it showed the man doing exactly what I had been trying to do. On the video he made the comment that unscrewing the faucet internals from the housing was a bit difficult but once it was done then you could simply replace the rubber gaskets on the inside. Once I knew that I was doing the right thing I gave it another go and I was able to remove the internals of the faucet.

My first idea was to actually replace the entire internal assembly since it was old and the faucet handle wasn't in very good shape. So I took the assembly with me and headed to the hardware store. I ended up going to both Menard's and Lowe's. Neither place could sell me just the internal assembly but instead could sell me either the entire faucet assembly+housing (pipe) or just the internal rubber gaskets. I really didn't want to replace the pipes in the house so in the end I just replaced the rubber gaskets. The project which should have taken less than an hour including the trip to to the hardware store ended up being over twice that long.

This evening I noticed that my hands (especially the right one) was getting very swollen in both the palm and fingers. After thinking about it I realized that it was my hives acting up in response to all the twisting of the difficult faucet handles that I had done earlier today. My hives are pretty well controlled by my Allegra but sometimes it seems like it is just below the surface waiting for some little extra stimulus and then it reacts strongly like this evening. I ended up soaking my hands in the bath and they seem to be doing better tonight.