What you see on the top is a one-hundred-year-old shower stem. What you see on the bottom is what a brand-new replacement of that shower stem looks like. What this photo does not show is the path that led from the top stem to the bottom one. That path began seven years ago when the original shower stem (which is the handle your turn to stop and start the water) started failing. I want to re-draw your attention to how long ago this issue began. In case you floated over it, the number was seven. Seven years is how long I've been nursing that top piece of hardware to keep it in active service. Another important number to know is one. One is the number of showers we have in our home which is why that tired-looking piece of metal had so much attention lavished upon it.

When we first called a plumber, they laughed at Marty when she said how many knobs we had in our shower. The answer is five. What they wanted to hear was one. Not five. When they sent the plumber to us, he laughed when he looked at our setup and said he was not authorized to work on stuff that old; in fact, he'd not seen something that old in more than a decade. If we'd like it replaced with a single knob, he could do that. If we wanted this repaired, he could not. 

We were coming off a decade of having a single-income home and had no savings account. If the fee to replace the shower was over sixty-five dollars, my accountant (whom I'm sleeping with) told me we could not afford it. It turns out that replacing a hundred-year-old shower is a good bit more than sixty-five dollars. So, I got to learn a whole lot more about shower valve stems than I ever thought I would. I've cut custom washers—that fixes water leaking from the shower head. We've banned the bathtub knobs from use—if you want to take a bath, fill it using the shower head. I've remade failed joints with something called self-forming valve packing rope—that fixes water leaking from the handle (did you even know that was possible? I did not). I have done these sorts of repairs, some multiple times over the last seven years. 

One unexpected problem was that every fix lasted shorter than the one before. The first custom Troy washer replacement lasted three years. The next 18 months. The next 3 months. The last one, less than a week. And the dripping became more of a pouring. It got so bad we would have to turn the home's main water supply off when someone wasn't showering. And when it got turned on, everyone showered, whether you thought you needed one or not--because not only is the shower stem a hundred years old, so are all of the pipes. 

So we finally relented.  I called the plumber and said we need the whole works replaced. Bust out the wall. Remove all the metal pipes and put in your plastic ones. The plumber was scheduled first thing Friday morning. Thursday afternoon, I had to run an errand for lunch. I decided to pull the valve stem (since the water was already turned off) and take it by the old-school hardware store that had helped me in the past, just this one last time. A homeowner's hail mary. 

An older man met me when I walked in the door and asked what I needed. I held up my palm, showing my bauble. 

Uh-uh. Can't help ya.

Really. You've helped me before. Some young guy. Really knew his stuff. 

He's not here anymore. You'd need to go to an old-school plumbing supply. 

I thought this was an old-school place. 

Not that old (referencing my hand with his eyes). 

Where then? 

Atlas. 

Fifteen minutes later, I'm at Atlas Plumbing Supply. The guy at the counter gave me the same initial prognosis. I explained that I was sent here special, told that you all knew this old stuff. He said they had one guy who might. He went in the back and returned with an older fellow, Ed. Ed looked at me and asked what I had. He took it from my hand, turned, and walked away studying the artifact. He reappeared ten minutes later, set it on the counter, and asked what was wrong with it. I listed and demonstrated the inventory of issues. He picked it up and left again. He returned after another ten minutes, reached under the counter, and hefted a book as thick as my thigh from beneath, saying we'd have to find it in this. It seemed "this" was an encyclopedia of every valve ever made in the history of valves. He slowly leafed through the pages, each of which displayed photographs and details of eight different valves. He'd occasionally pick up my part and hold it against one of the pictures before moving on. He, the counter guy, and I chatted about things during his search and find. 

Then I heard the metal rings of the binder snap open; Ed pulled a page from the book, slid it towards me, and brought his index finger down on the second valve on the page. There it is, he proclaimed. I looked at it. It was so shiny in comparison it was hard to believe they were the same. I expressed as much. He re-iterated with absolute certainty they were the same. He made a copy of the page and told me that, knowing the part number, I should be able to find one online somewhere. Back at home, per my twenty minutes of research, it appeared there was one place and one place only that had it. An outfit out of Cincinnati, Ohio called Noel's Plumbing. I ordered the stem. I canceled the plumber. 

While I waited the forty eight hours for the part to arrive, I felt it was a 50/50 proposition. There was just no way a brand new replacement for this hundred year old relic was available. 

The thank you card I wrote to Ed one week later included the following words.  And because of Ed @ Atlas Plumbing and the good folks at Noel's in Cincy, our shower is ready for its second century.