Our faucet is mounted on our sink, not our countertop. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the drain lever not installing properly but my husband can't get it connected. The angle of the rod is preventing it from being connected to the lift rod. I had seen other reviews where they had the same issue but they were able to push their faucet forward morE and it worked. We can't do that with ours. Also, in the instructions it says there are small screws that go into each of the faucet handles and we didn't get those screws in our box.

This picture is upside down. No matter what I did that's how it kept loading.