Whenever you undertake a major renovation in your home, you do your best to avoid mistakes: You follow the instructions as closely as you can, or even hire a professional contractor to do the work for you. Sometimes however things go wrong and you might need to repair your vanity cabinets, or other problem areas, yourself. By learning some simple repair techniques before your next project starts, you’ll be ready for whatever the future holds.
Leaking faucet or pipe
If you installed your vanity cabinets yourself, you needed to turn off the water supply at one point or another. Perhaps you needed to change the pipe or attach new faucet fixtures to the sink. When this happened and you screwed the pieces back together again, all looked fine. There were no leaks, and no signs that anything might not be working properly. A few days later though, a leak appeared. This sometimes happens due to installation problems that aren’t noticed until the bathroom is used more frequently.
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Here are some quick ways to seal a leak:
• Identify where it’s coming from first. You can do this by drying off the area under the sink and placing a piece of paper underneath. Wherever it’s wet is where the leak is coming from.
• Turn off the water supply.
• Determine if you simply need to tighten the faulty connection. Depending on the nature of the joint, use either a pipe wrench, or tighten by hand.
• Turn the water on again. If nothing leaks, you’ve fixed the problem. If you’re still seeing leaks, turn the water off and try the next fix.
• Seal the joint with either Teflon (or PTFE) thread sealing tape or thread sealing compound. The tape is wound around male threads, always in the same direction that the fitting is tightened onto the pipe. When using the compound, follow the directions carefully or otherwise the seal won’t be effective.
Broken cabinet door
Maybe you pulled too quickly on a cabinet door or didn’t install it properly-in any case, it’s fallen off now. The easiest way to fix this problem is to replace the hinges if they’re cracked, or simply use longer screws that hold better. (You may also have to patch the screw holes with wood filler if they’ve become too wide to hold a screw.)
If the door itself is broken into pieces, you’ll need to replace it entirely by contacting the dealer you bought the vanity from.
Cracked tile or grout
Sometimes the tiling around vanity cabinets will break or crack if it wasn’t installed properly. This can happen months after the initial installation due to changes in humidity and temperature that create additional pressure or uneven joint expansion. The remedy is to replace damaged tiles individually, or install new sealer wherever the grout is cracked. Depending on how old the floor is, getting the right color match between old and new may require experimentation with different colors, stains, and/or sealers. Again, it’s important to follow directions closely in order to avoid future problems.
In the end, you may see a repair issue as a sign that it’s finally time to re-do the bathroom you’ve been putting up with for years.