The Elusive Wall Valve

Yes, I'm blogging about a wall valve. A few months ago I'd never heard of a wall valve, but in the past few weeks it has become my obsession. You see, wall faucets operate in a strange way - the "faucet" itself is a whole complicated system consisting of a trim kit (the pretty stuff you see) and a wall valve (hiding behind the wall and doing all the work).

I ordered our beautiful wall faucets (i.e. trim kits) for the double vanity upstairs nearly a month ago. Here they are. Aren't they beautiful?

At the time I was slightly annoyed to have to pay the price of the faucet again for this silly valve to make the faucet more than a chrome wall sculpture. Little did I know how much this valve would plague me . . . . .

I originally ordered the valve from the same online vendor as the faucets, but while the faucets promptly arrived the valves kept getting delayed a week at a time. Eventually I cancelled and called around to all the big box home improvement stores, but none of them had it in stock either. I finally called a local plumbers' supply store and learned what the difficulty was - Moen is behind on making these parts, and they're a fairly rare part so Moen actually has caused the backorder, and will not have any valves available for at least a month.

Which is inconvenient because the plumber is here now!

And this is the only valve that works with our faucets. And I have the faucets. And I love them.

So, I thought I was pretty smart and went on ebay and ordered 2 valves from 2 different vendors. I called these vendors every day (bless their hearts) to make sure that the valve was in stock, and to check on the approximate shipping date. Today I received valve #1, but not valve #2, which I was promised would be here today. So I called seller #2 only to find it was out of stock. Which apparently took them 6 days (and a whole lot of phone calls from yours truly) to realize.

So tonight I have called 27 different vendors tonight, desperately searching for this valve. Seriously, 27. I counted.

And 26 of them told me it's out of stock. So, I've been on online chat with #27 for the past 18 minutes, because (1) they don't use phones to keep costs down (we'll see about that) and (2) they have 2 in stock. So I feel like it's 1997 and I'm on AOL Instant Messenger with a plumber, to try to get this valve overnighted to us. Yes, overnighted. And it's all brass. Which is apparently heavy. But I really don't care.

We need the valve. Otherwise we only have trim, which apparently does not work with the whole water thing.

So, I'm sticking it out here to get this thing ordered and (hopefully) here by Saturday.  The valve madness has delayed us a bit, but at this point I don't feel like I can complain as we've been so pleased with the pace of progress, and with how everything is looking so far. Just this morning I met with the electrician and the drywaller, both of whom will be hard at work within the week, followed by the hardwood floor installer for the kitchen.

We're both so excited to see things start coming in, and so eager to have this house we've been living in for the past two and a half years finally become a home.

So please, cross your fingers that we receive this valve by Saturday.