Captain Midnight, undaunted as usual, knew just what to do.

For nearly three decades, the master bath in my mom's home has featured a notorious sink with a hair-washing hose and a continuously dripping faucet. Various family members have tried to fix it, to no avail. Mom hired a professional plumber who took one look at the sink and declared it impossible to fix -- since the sink was custom made in the late 1970s, the faucet and tap holes weren't compatible with modern fixtures, and the leaky old cartridge-style faucet wasn't even manufactured any more, so the only viable option would be to extract and replace the entire sink. Another plumber said he could replace the faucet and handles if Mom would find the 40-year-old parts herself, then indicated he would further charge her for those parts when he did the job. (She took a pass on that one.) Over time, Mom's leaky sink has become a kind of impossible task, the one project at Mom's house that nobody even bothers to take on.

And over Christmas vacation, Captain Midnight fixed it.

He took the old faucet and taps apart, bought new ones, then found that the cold-water hole was too small to fit the modern tap, so he took a small hacksaw to the vitreous china and carefully enlarged the hole until the new tap fit. The teardrop-shaped hole for the faucet wasn't completely covered by the new hardware, so he just caulked over the tiny triangular area not covered by the faucet. (He did the same thing to cover the hole where he pulled out and discarded the mildew-ridden hair-washing hose. Eventually he'll find a smooth metal plug to fit the hole.) He discovered that the new drain plug he'd picked up was too large for the sink's drain hole, so he pulled out the old drain plug, took it in for reference and found hardware that would fit the existing drain. He tore apart one of the weirdest pieces of plumbed copper tubing he'd ever seen under a sink, and replaced the old setup with modern connections to the hot and cold water. He got the hot water tap working again for the first time in years, then let the hot water run until the buildup of rust and scale washed out of the pipes. He cleaned up the years of accumulated limescale and made that sink shine.

The impossible task has been vanquished. And not only does the sink work well, it also looks pretty darn good. Because Captain Midnight knew just what to do!

The new taps look kinda like this. EXCEPT COOLER!
Because CM is just that awesome.