"I'll go find someone"

Aww Home Depot.  How we love and loath you.  First off, thank you for being only ten minutes away and almost always being open when we need you (except that one time you had just closed and we had to go somehwere else).  And thank you for employing people that almost always know what they are talking about, and for having other helpful customers come to our rescue when our faces say, "ugh, what?"  And thank you too for not having just one perfect fitting pipe that we need, but for having 4376 different choices for one piece of piping and other household materials.  Because seeing as we don't know much about one thing, but please, yes, throw in 4375 other pieces, just so we have the same amount of options and chances of getting more confused about remolding.  Enter the tub drain fiasco.

After we pulled out the old tub and took a closer look at the new one, we very quickly realized that the old drain piping (the floor) was not going to match up with the new drain.  The new drain was set about an inch further into the tub than the old one.  And of course the new drain piping did not fit onto the metal/copper water pipes in the floorboards, I mean come one, why would they want to do that?  Sooo, off to Home Depot we went, needing to find a 1/2" opening to fit around a 1/2" pipe (or something along those lines).

Once we arrived in the pipe/plumbing aisle, our hearts sank a few leagues.  This may help explain why:

There were only 4753 different choices of pipe pieces that could maybe, possibly be the one we need.  So, we strolled down the aisle, you know, acting like we're pros who have done this countless times before.  We found the 1/2 inch pipe opening section of the aisle and started our little scavenger hunt.

And of course (again) nothing was fitting together.  After about 37 trial and error fit tests, I went off in search of a worker....Word to the wise, you can always find someone in the kitchen/counter top area.  So the slowest moving guy in the world followed me back to plumping and herded us to another part of the aisle and showed us this:

You can tighten and loosen the ends to fit over different sized pipes...just what we thought we needed.  We bought a couple other pieces for any possible "just in case" situations (which we tend to have) and skipped back to the car to head home (ok, maybe I skipped and Matt walked).

After trying to make the new piece work as a connector over the in-floor pipes to the new drain pipes...we couldn't make it work...again.  The black pipe piece now made the drain too tall to fit under the bathtub...back to square one.

Over the next day, Matt figured out that we could use part of the old drain piping with the new drain piping, and the new black piece, to make the whole new drain work....no idea how, but he did. :)

Oh, and for the record....We realize that we don't 100% know what we're doing at every moment, or the exact terminology, but we're learning more every day and with each task we take on.  Think happy renovating thoughts for us! :)