So here's the situation. Diana and I wanted to replace the tub/shower fixtures in our guest bathroom. This should be an easy job (foreshadowing). The current setup is separate hot/cold handles, as well as a third handle to divert water to either the shower or tub spout. Then, obviously, the showerhead and tub spout.

Removing the faucet handles is cake. Pop off the "H" and "C" and arrow caps, unscrew the screws, and pull them off the valve stem. The base of the handles was stuck to the wall with some gooey putty stuff, but I was able to cut through that and pull them off the wall as well. So I'm left with the valves, and can see where they are plugged into the main pipes. Gravy.

Then I go to work on the tub spout. Tub spouts are either held in place with a little hex screw that holds it onto a pipe that exends from the wall, or they simply are screwed into that pipe. I couldn't find any hex screw, so I figured I could just unscrew the thing. There was a lot of that gooey-putty stuff, and it took a little effort to get it started, but soon I was unscewing it.

Or so I thought.

What I'd actually done was (and I have no idea how) start torquing the copper pipe about 2 inches inside the wall. It wasn't until too late that I realized I wasn't unscrewing, but twisting and tearing through metal. I SHOULD have been unscrewing, but the tub-spout has, over the years, apparently fused itself onto the pipe. I obviously didn't think I was applying enough force to do any damage, but, well, here we are.

So, what I have now is a 5-inch long tub-spout in my hand, still attached to a 7-inch piece of copper tubing, which ends in a ragged, nasty mess. 2 inches inside a hole in the tile is the other end of that ragged mess, which is in turn soldered into a little right angle elbow thing.

Fuck. Click for pictures

So, now what must happen is that the existing pipe must be unsoldered from the elbow and removed. Potentially a new pipe could be replaced into that elbow, or the whole elbow must be cut off and replaced. Either way, this requires a lot of heat.

Options:

1) Try to do everything through the small hole in the tile. The would surely create enough heat in the wall that a large portion of the house would burn down. This is unacceptable.

2) Remove a lot of tile and wall in the shower to access the pipes. Then patch the wall and replace tile (if we can find a close enough match).

3) The wall on the other side of the shower is a 6x8 foot floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall mirror, which is glued to the wall. So we could remove the mirror (undoubtedly requiring breaking it), cut through drywall, and access pipes from there. Patch drywall, replace mirror.

I do not like any of these options.

It's pretty bad luck. I don't feel like this should have been any more complicated than changing a lightbulb. I'd feel really stupid and sheepish if I felt like I'd tried to bite off more than I could chew, but I don't think I did. If anything, I should have been a bit more careful when I realized the tub spout wasn't coming lose, but everything I've read, both before and after the fact, said that it's supposed to unscrew. And if it doesn't unscrew, they said use a wrench or screwdriver for leverage.

Muh.