Shower Faucets require relatively little maintenance. Install a good brand, and you can remain worry-free for years. But if you are relocating or even renovating your bathroom, you need to consider changing a shower faucet. It might seem hard, but with proper guidance and experience, you’ll be able to do it in 20 minutes or within an hour at most.
I pointed out these steps in this article in a way that you’d not need a plumber to do the bidding for you. In turn, you’ll save yourselves some bucks as well.
Buy Shower Faucet of the Same Brand and Model
When you are changing a shower faucet, preparing for it is a huge part of the job. You need to get a new shower faucet that you’ll install when you change the existing one. It is absolutely a must to get the new faucet from the same manufacturer and model as your old one. For example, if you had a Kohler faucet before, you must get a Kohler faucet as a replacement. Or else, the new one won’t fit in with the valves.
Get Your Tools Right
You’ll need an impressive repertoire of tools if you want to do this. The first thing you’ll need is a wrench. The list continues as you need a screwdriver, your new faucet, a marker, a drill machine. Safety gloves and a pair of goggles. Don’t forget to take a towel to wipe the water drops.
Before You Begin, Turn Off Your Water Connection
Depending on where you dwell in, you might have the water supply valve located in your bathroom or at the back of your house. Some might have it in their basement as well. Remember to shut it off. This disconnects the water supply you have at your house. As you tinker with your shower faucet, there is no longer a possibility of wasting extra water when you begin changing it.
Lay a Cloth beneath the Faucet
The next step is fairly simple. You need to lay a cloth beneath the faucet and on the floor. The cloth will keep important parts from falling off the drain or getting lost. The canvas cloth also keeps debris from the walls from spreading all over the bathroom. As a result, you won’t have to deal with a dirty bathroom after you are done.
Proceed with Removing the Faucet
Here is where the actual fun begins! From here on, we’ll be removing the existing faucet (or faucets depending on how many you have in your house). Let us go through the steps in bullet points.
Put the screw driver inside the faucet trim cap and the handle and pry it to take the trim cap out.
Then, insert the screwdriver inside the screw of your faucet handle and hold it there. With another hand, just rotate the screw opposite the clock to take it out. The handle will loosen up. Once it loosens up, just take it out to expose the inner part.
You’ll find an escutcheon covering the wall after you look through the faucet’s inner part. Use a flatbed screwdriver to pry the escutcheon out. Do it gently, so the rest of the set up remains intact.
At the final step of removing a Shower Faucet, you’ll find restraining nut located behind the hole in the wall. Use the wrench to loosen it and then remove it. This will expose the faucet mount. After that, remove the faucet mount by using pliers.
This concludes the section where we get the existing faucet out. Afterward, I’ll guide you through “How to Install the New Faucet” that you chose.
How to Install the New Faucet?
Like the previous point, let us also break this into bullet points so that people can follow along without difficulty.
This time, we’ll do the reverse. Insert the new faucet post you bought from the faucet kit. Then place the restraining nut in place. Make sure the nut is tight, use the wrench to tighten the nut well.
The next step is to mount the escutcheon into the wall. After that, place the handle at the right place. Use the screwdriver to attach some screws and tighten them. The last thing you have to do is to place a few trim caps over the handles and you are done!
After everything is done, clean up and turn the water shutoff valve back on to test how the faucet is working.
Final Words
Changing the faucet isn’t a big deal once you know what you are doing and how to do it. Although I’ve shown you how to change shower tap for a single outlet, you can repeat the process for multiple faucets too. The only thing is, don’t leave your water connection on while changing the accessory. If you accidentally leave water on, it might endanger your walls of damage due to water leakage.