If you've done a wee bit of your own plumbing you might scoff at the idea that plumbers are worth those labor costs they charge. That's assuming, of course, that your "vast experience" is limited to putting a new flap in a toilet tank or replacing the washer on a leaky faucet. It's when you get away from simple jobs and jobs that can be performed while standing up that you begin to appreciate the skills of a trained plumber - not to mention the tools of a trained plumber.

Many a wannabe home decorator will blithely wave a hand at the grungy old faucets in your sinks and lavatories and tell you that you can make a bathroom look "all new" simply by swapping out the faucets (which is, to some extent, true). So you shop around until you find a new set you like (brushed nickel finishes are oh, so popular these days) and take it home - that's when the fun begins; that's when you figure out why plumbers make the big bucks. You find yourself lying on your back in a dark (and sometimes damp) space underneath a sink, staring up at that pair of nuts where the supply line connects to the bottom of the old faucet, thinking "How the bloody hell am I going to be able to get a wrench on a pair of old nuts in a space three inches wide and thirty inches over my head?" I know the feeling: I've replaced faucets in three kitchen sinks and something like ten bathroom sinks over the past few years... My secret? I own a basin wrench. In fact, I own two - I inherited my Dad's a while back, and even though it's a Stanley that's probably sixty years old, it looks almost exactly like the one I bought a couple of years ago.

========================== speaking of plumber's labor prices: =========================

A heart surgeon was chatting with a plumber at a party and asked the latter what he charged. "It depends. I charge $45 to replace a faucet washer, and it only takes six minutes - that works out to $450 per hour." "Why, I only charge $300 per hour!" the surgeon exclaimed. "I know exactly what you mean," replied the plumber, "that's what I charged when I was a surgeon."

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A basin wrench is designed specifically for reaching deep into dark, tight places (hmmmm, maybe I can use it to change the oil on the 'Yota). It consists of a long shank to give the reach needed to clear sink bottoms, and a sliding bar set at right angles on the bottom so you can apply the torque needed to unscrew those rusty old nuts. On the business end there's a wrench comprising a flat, fixed jaw and a crescent-shaped, spring-mounted movable jaw. The movable jaw opens wide enough for one-inch nuts, whether hex- or square-head. The entire assembly pivots 180°, flipping over so you can apply clockwise or counter-clockwise torque (righty-tighty, lefty-loosey) just as you must reverse a pipe wrench depending on the sense of the rotation you need to apply.

The hardened teeth on the adjustable wrench part do chew up brass nuts, just like a pipe wrench; but by the same token they're sufficiently adjustable to grab a rusty or damaged nut in place. Either way, it's a lot easier to get a basin wrench on a nut than to fish around with a crescent or open-end wrench in those tight spaces. One limitation is the amount of torque you can apply, but the judicious use of WD-40 could help there.

My particular model has a fixed-length eleven-inch shank, but fancier models have telescoping shanks that can reach from perhaps nine to as far as seventeen inches - needed when a faucet is mounted on a level stepped above the sink. Some other models also accommodate larger nut sizes, up to 1-1/2 inches. So far, though (knock wood), I haven't found anything that my bare-bones model can't handle.

So the next time you find yourself lying on your back working around a looming J-trap, swearing and sweating while you try desperately to fit a wrench on a supply line up behind the sink, remember the words "basin wrench." Don't you always need an excuse to buy a new tool?


By the way: you'll want some plumber's putty, too!

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