Nikroo

Any help here is thoroughly appreciated.
I was trying to disconnect the cold water line from the washing machine faucet. It was very hard to loosen so as I turned it, the faucet seemed to snap and I could hear water rushing out under what seems to be a plastic housing for the faucets. I turned off the water immediately and now I am left with no water and apparently a broken pipe or part of the faucet under the housing which I am nto sure how to get to. How does one get to the plumbing behind/under the faucet housing to replace the valve?

Thanks,
Nikroo

LookoutRanch

The plastic housing is in the wall behind the washer, right?

You're going to have to get that plastic housing out, and to do that you may need to remove the other faucet. You may also have to cut a hole in the sheetrock, depending on where the break occurred and what you have to do to get at it.

You may have twisted out a soldered copper fitting.

If none of this sounds familiar to you, you should get professional help because this has the potential to get complicated.

al's sewer

that housing is called a washer box. the only way to get to the pipe is to cut drywall. sounds to me like it might be a plastic cpvc or pvc line if it snapped that easy. only way to tell is to look at it.

Nikroo

Hi everyone and thanks for all the replies.
I got it fixed doing the following FYI.

I went to Home Depot and saw a new one that the guy told me is usually nailed to the studs and that I would have to cut the dry wall completely but I wanted to see what was going on before doing that.
So, I cut the dry wall about an inch below the plastic box. I saw that there was the threaded pipe theat threaded into the valve as I had seen in the ready to go one at HD. A copper pipe was then soldered into threaded pipe section as the HD guy had predicted. To my surprise the pipe section coming down from the valve had snaped into two in the middle of the threaded section!! Maybe due to corrosion and weakening at that point. So, this gave the idea of getting a threaded union (short one, about 1 in in length) to patch the threaded part back together.
I first pulled out the valve (cold size was the broken one) by loosening the nut that secured it to the box from underneath which I could barely get to, through the 1" cut in the dry wall (would have been easier of I cut the dry wall further). I bought the union, used sand paper to smooth out the threads on the broken threaded part still threaded into the valve. Did the same on the part reamining soldered to the copper part inside the dry wall (again with limted access given the 1 " dry wall cut- I am not good with dry wall, otherwise a larger cut would have made it easier).
Then threaded the union onto the piece soldered to the copper pipe, and then threaded the valve from the opening in the box for the vale into the top side of the union. The valve is now sticking about half inch above the surface of the box but noting leaks now!!
If this had not worked, I would have had to cut the dry wall from the back side, pulled the box (cutting the copper pipe) and then replace it with a new one, soldering the copper pipe into the threaded pipes attached to the valves.