Fixing loose screws now will help prevent costly repairs in future

You’re ready to take a shower. You reach for the valve that turns cold to hot, and the lever you use every single day wobbles. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall off, but it isn’t right. You can’t pay much attention now, though, because the water’s heating up and you have to get on with your busy day.

This happens every morning, and from time to time you think, “One of these days I need to repair that thing before it falls off.”

Well here’s some advice: The sooner you make the repair, the better your chance for success.

As parts loosen or slip they tend to damage whatever is normally retaining them. A loose shower valve handle can wobble enough to damage the surrounding trim plate, converting a one-minute repair into an expensive remodeling project. A loose towel bar can damage the wall, and instead of simply tightening a screw to put things back in order, you may end up with a wall patch and painting, and still be left with a screw that needs tightening.

The nice thing about loose nuts, bolts and screws is that they are among the simplest of repairs. Here’s all you need to know to fill your “fixing loose stuff” bag of tricks: Find the hidden screw that needs tightening, then use the right tool to resecure it.

With faucets and valves, the screw is usually “on the other side.” That means that if you stand in the shower and look at the control handle, chances are all you have to do is bend down and look up from below. The retainer screw is usually hidden in an out of the way location.

Sometimes the retaining screw is hidden beneath a removable cap. The “H” or “C” plates normally located on the handles of a two-handle valve system often double as screw covers. On single-lever valves, it’s the cap on the handle with the arrows on it.

There are an infinite number of possibilities, but you get the idea. Simply look around the valve, towel bar or toilet paper holder in the more “hidden” locations. You are bound to discover a hole with a screw.

Once you know where the screw is, the next step is to find the proper tool to make the repair. For some reason, the folks who make retaining screws have decided that their screw is the most important of the bunch, and must be different than all of the rest. Here’s what you normally find: An Allen head screw in a nonstandard size or a slot-head screw that has either a really wide or a really narrow slot.

We will never be able to figure out why the engineers of retaining screws use an extra-wide slot on screw-heads. Invariably, we are left taking a normal blade-type screwdriver and grinding it to a narrower width to get the proper fit. In other cases, we find ourselves thinning down the blade of a tiny “computer sized” screwdriver to fit the task.

We recently performed a project involving an Allen head screw and had to use pliers on the end of the hex wrench to get enough leverage to batten down the hatches.

In any event, don’t let these tiny adjustments go so long as to become major repairs. Remember: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”