What Were They Thinking?

I've been doing a lot of plumbing work in the basement of our rehab house lately. It seems like old iron pipe tends to gunk up on the inside after many years, causing faucets to run really slow. So many of them needed to be replaced. Yesterday I arrived at one of the water heaters, and the above picture is one of the connections to this water heater. Leaning out of the top at a crazy angle was flexible copper pipe, kinked in two places, several miscellaneous iron fittings, a ball valve that wouldn't open all the way because it hit the pipe, more iron fittings, ten feet of copper, and another twelve feet of iron with a big patch in one spot. It all got replaced with CPVC.

Meanwhile, Deb put the first coat of polyurethane on the living room floor that Josh just finished sanding. Josh spent most of the day with Barabbas (the name given to our big noisy old floor sander), taking all the layers of paint and gunk off the hardwood floor. It's a noisy, dusty, nasty job, but the result is so much nicer than the beige carpet that formerly covered this floor.

So Many Colors, So Little Time

This is Deb, in her usual research position, surrounded by color swatches. Since she has the better feel for color, she gets to decide what colors to paint our rehab house. The boys have been scraping old paint for the last four weeks and are nearly done. They even spent time on it today, in 90+ degree heat. It's kind of a miserable job, but it has to be done.

David told me he would rather stand on a scaffold and scrape than paint. Now that the scraping is nearly done ... it's time to paint.

Me, I get the really fun stuff, like cutting holes in walls to fix plumbing leaks, figuring out why plugs in the kitchen don't work, and reglazing windows.

Somehow, the plumbing always sneaks in there somewhere.

Deconstruction

Why would I want to take a second-floor bathroom that looks like this...


...and allow my boys in with hammers and wrecking bars...


...to make it look like this...


...then like this...


...then like this?


Because I can?

No.

Because I want to?

No. Y'all know I hate plumbing and bathrooms are usually full of plumbing.

It's because it desperately needed it, for the following reasons:

The claw-foot bathtub had to go. Some prior owner framed it in by building a wall around it, making it look like some sort of bath-nook. His framing job was bad and his tile job was even worse. The grout was falling out and what was left was mildewed. The tub was also propped up on one end so it would drain properly. The house has settled significantly over the past 130 years or so, and the bathroom has a decided lean to it.

The floor was spongy. The prior owner covered up a problem by putting laminate floor over it. That just made the laminate floor look like it had a problem also.

The house and the plumbing have settled at different rates. The result is that the main waste stack is now at least three inches higher than it used to be relative to the rest of the house. This made the toilet lean forward at a rather precarious angle. The floor around the throne was built up slightly in an attempt to compensate for the plumbing. While that hid the pipes from showing through, it didn't do anything for the slope of the floor, or the obvious lean of the toilet.

This is one of those jobs that works like an onion. On the surface it doesn't look too bad. Peeling away one layer makes you cry and reveals another layer. Peeling away that layer makes you cry again and reveals another layer. And so on, ad infinitum.

So, let the extreme makeover begin.

It has to get worse before it gets better. Here are the steps to making it worse.

1. Remove the toilet and the sink.
2. Remove all the tile and the false wall around the claw-foot tub. This creates an enormous amount of dust and debris. The entire tub is now full of broken tile, dirt, plaster chunks, nails, and cement backer board.
3. Remove the laminate floor.
4. Observe all the moisture problems under the laminate floor.
5. Remove the rotten hardwood floor. I'm sure it was beautiful at one time. It's not beautiful now.
6. Remove portions of the subfloor to expose the plumbing. Actually, most of it was already exposed, having pushed itself through the subfloor.
7. Clean the tub out and remove the tub. I had the boys wrestle it down the stairs. They are younger and stronger than I am and need these colorful experiences. The tub was extremely heavy and the stairs extremely narrow. They are now much better for having experienced this.
8. Look at the plumbing and scratch my head. I'm either going to have to lower the plumbing or raise the floor. I vote for lowering the plumbing. Unfortunately this has other implications and eventually led to removing the entire waste stack, from the basement all the way through the roof. This affects the first floor bathroom also (not to mention every other plumbing fixture in the house). Now the first floor bathroom has large holes in the wall.
9. Rebuild the waste stack using PVC plastic pipe. It looks a lot better now. And it doesn't leak. Several of the sections of old iron pipe were split and leaking, and one broke completely in half as I was attempting to remove it. I think I made the right decision.
10. Observe how the prior owner fixed plumbing problems by joining pipe without glue. In one instance, he accounted for the difference in size between two fittings by stuffing the gaps with a plastic shopping bag. I'm sure Meijer would be interested that their bag was recycled in this manner.
11. Remove all the lath and plaster. It was in rough shape anyway. We'll start fresh with drywall.

I think I'm nearly at the point where I can start making it better. It can't get much worse than this. There's practically nothing left.

Now I just have to compensate for the slant of the house, install a new subfloor, install new plumbing for the bathtub and shower, insulate the outer wall, fix the window, modify the heating ducts, install new drywall, install new fixtures, including new tub and surround, install new finish flooring, and finally finish it off with paint.

Once this is all done, I get to do most of this over again in the bathroom downstairs.

Wanna help?

Acidic Eruptions

I hate plumbing. If you've read anything I've written previously about plumbing, you already know that. This could be reason number 235 why I hate plumbing. I have nothing against the profession of plumbing. It's a good honest way to make a living. It's a good honest way for somebody ELSE to make a living. Just not me.



This latest episode involves the house we bought last December. If you know about this house, you are probably wondering what ever possessed me to buy an old house that has six bathrooms and six kitchens. One where the pipes were all frozen a couple winters ago.

When I finally got the water turned on (which is a separate story all by itself), it began to rain in several rooms from the split pipes in the ceilings. I did what any good handyman would do. I hired a plumber. When it became obvious that this plumber would not finish the job in time because he was so busy, I hired another plumber. About four weeks later, when he was wrapping up the last details, I told him to replace a section of pipe in the basement that came from a second floor kitchen.

"When I turn the water on in the kitchen," I told him, "it drains for a while and then suddenly stops. I estimate from the amount of water that actually does go down that the blockage is in the basement."

He took a look at it and told me that they don't handle that kind of work anymore. "Roto-Rooter and the like has taken all that business from us," he said. "That line needs to be snaked out and we don't have the equipment to do that." He told me that he didn't think just replacing the pipe would do it.

I called Roto Rooter. They said they could be out there that afternoon. Later on in the day, he called me back.

"That one is pretty bad," he told me. "It's completely clogged with grease. I snaked it three times before it would drain at all. And it's still a little slow. I put a whole bottle of Pipe Shield down the drain. It should clear it out. It's an enzyme which will dissolve the grease. Just don't use it for 24 hours to allow it to work. If it doesn't work, I have some other stuff called EZ Flow which should do the trick. It's sulferic acid and should eat right through it. It's expensive stuff so we save that for the really bad cases. Let me know if the Pipe Shield doesn't work and I can come back."

Two days later I called him back. "The water doesn't go anywhere," I told him. "It just fills the sink up."

He came the next day. I received a phone call at work from him.

"I put a whole bottle of EZ Flow down the drain, and it is still stopped up. I think you are going to have to replace the section of pipe in the basement. From the amount of water that goes down before it stops, that's probably where the problem is."

Hmmm. It seems I told the last plumber that. An now I just paid another plumber to come out and confirm what I already knew. I told him I would replace the pipe myself. I had enough into this already. Time to roll up the sleeves and dive in. Tim the Plumber strikes again.

This past Friday, I came to the house armed with a new section of plastic pipe, a few fittings, and my odd assortment of plumbers tools. The fittings on the iron pipe were too rusted to take apart so I attacked it with a hacksaw. It dribbled a rather viscous solution of brown goo as I was doing so, but I soon had the suspect section down. As I suspected, it was completely full of gunk. The section in the ceiling was also full of gunk so I stuck an old paint stirring stick in it to get it out.

The pipe drooled brown every time I pulled the stick out and I soon had most of the gunk out of the exposed section. I ran upstairs and ran some water down the drain to see if it was starting to clear. When I got back to the basement, none of the water had made it down. It just dribbled slowly onto the floor. At this rate, it would take all day for the sink to empty out.

I found a piece of flexible tubing and shoved it into the pipe. The tubing was longer than the stick and flexible so it could go around the elbow in the pipe. More thick brown goo ended up on the floor every time I pulled the pipe out. It was also starting to smell pretty ripe.

After I probed as far as the tubing would allow, I ran up to the kitchen and ran a little more water down the drain. Back downstairs to see that none of it had made it out the open end of the pipe. Just a slow, steady drip, drip of dark brown sludge.

I studied the situation for a little while, wondering what to do next. As I sat there looking at it, there suddenly came from the open end of the pipe a gurgling sound. This sound rapidly rose in crescendo until all at once, with a hissing, splattering sound, a column of brown water erupted out the end of the pipe and splashed to the floor about eight feet away. In a couple seconds, this mixture of enzyme, sulferic acid, and water dwindled to a fast dribble, but not before the entire section of the basement, including my tools, supplies, and an old clothes dryer that happened to be in the line of fire was covered with thick, sludge-like substance. A big wad of stuff resembling a giant hairball also ended up on top of the dryer.

When the flow died away completely, I figured I would leave it until the next day, perhaps it would be more tolerable when it had dried out.

The next day, a Saturday, I waited until the afternoon to give it a good chance to dry. It didn't take long to put the new section of pipe in now that all the hard work was done.. Now when I fill the sink with water and then pull the drains, I get these cool little whirlpools in the water, and the water goes away fast. One more item finally checked off the to-do list. The other task that I did on the same day was to replace a sink in a third floor bathroom. More plumbing, more headaches, fit for another story.

"H" is for Cold

It leaks.

I turned the water on the other day, partly to test my plumbing work and partly because we needed the water in the greenhouse. The joint where the new pipe joins the old began the familiar shimmer around the edge, and then formed a droplet which eventually fell onto the floor in front of the clothes washer. It was soon followed by another, and another; little shimmering dribbles growing, then falling, growing, the falling. It would have been rather hypnotic had it not been so maddening. Of course, I do not have the parts, which will necessitate a fourth trip to Lowe's.

I fixed it temporarily with an empty paint can, hanging it below the pipe to catch the dribbles.

We're big into life skills for the boys and this would have been another opportunity for life skills training. But we've done quite a bit of plumbing and are to the point where perhaps plumbing training is becoming counterproductive. I had David help me put the faucet back on the bathroom sink after we had it re-glazed several weeks ago. I showed him which hoses to hook up where under the sink and he worked at it for a while, looking like a plumber. Only the bottom half of him was visible, sticking out from under the sink and I could hear the clanking of wrenches and pliers.

When he emerged, I asked him if he trusted his work enough to turn the water on. He just grinned.

I ducked under the sink to make sure the drain was all tightened down and noticed something amiss.

"David!" I exclaimed, "Did you realize that you got the hot and cold water pipes backwards?"

His grin just got a little bigger. "Rats!" he said, with a twinkle in his eye. "You weren't supposed to notice this soon!" He was hoping it would go unnoticed until someone (usually Deb) turned on the hot water, waiting for it to warm up. It would have been a long wait.

When your son starts sabotaging the plumbing, then it's time to end the training. He can learn in the school of hard knocks once he gets his own home. Then we'll see what kind of water comes out when you turn the handle marked "H".

Purple and Happy

"Use only in a well-ventilated area."

Yeah, right. The instructions on the can don't take into account that most plumbing is in basements, or close crawl spaces. This latest plumbing job was to replace a faucet that I temporarily repaired last fall by simply screwing another valve onto the end of it. My makeshift fix froze over the winter and split. This was another one of those I-Hate-Plumbing jobs.

This time, I was going to do it right. I paid the big bucks for one of those freeze proof faucets. Armed with my newest purchase, a flashlight, and a hack saw, I wormed into the crawl space under the family room to where last year's twisted pipe was. It took some pretty good bodily twisting to actually get the saw onto the section of pipe that needed to be cut, but I managed to start the cut... and got water and copper shavings dribbled onto my face.

This is part of the job, I told myself, and kept going. Eventually, the pipe was free. I wormed out of the crawl space, pulled the old faucet out from the outside, and inserted the new one into the hole in the wall. Back into the crawl space, back into the contorted position so I could reach the tail end of the faucet so I could wrap it with plumber's tape.

I picked up the plastic pipe fitting that mated with the tail of the faucet and saw that it was the wrong size. How typical. This meant another trip to Lowe's to replace a 35 cent part. And it was one of the few parts I didn't have in my large bag of leftover plastic pipe fittings. It seems that every plumbing job requires at least two trips to the hardware store, so this would get the obligatory second trip over with.

I checked out with the same cashier that I had just an hour before. She appeared surprised that I was back so soon, buying another part for 35 cents. Out of my frustration, I didn't offer any explanation.

Back in the crawl space, I now had to thread the new part onto the faucet. This is rather hard to do when both arms are extended over one's head into the floor boards while the rest of the body resembles the fetal position. I managed to get another section of pipe glued into the fitting, and an elbow onto the pipe so now it extended below the floorboards, making the next sections much easier to put on. I only dribbled a little of the purple primer onto my hands and managed to sniff just a little of the Tetrahydrofuran and Methyl Ethyl Ketone and Cyclohexanone contained in the pipe glue. It makes for a rather odiferous crawl space and a rather light-headed plumber.

Only a short section of pipe and a coupling remained between me and another completed plumbing job. The short section of pipe was glued in quickly, but I then discovered that the old section of pipe was just very slightly larger than the fittings allowed. It seems that pipe this old was no longer compatible with today's version.

Oh, the joys of owning an older home. Now I was not only replacing a faucet, I was going to have to replace 40 feet of pipe as well. This resulted in trip number three to Lowe's to get the necessary pipe and fittings. A 1-hour job was now spreading out into 2 complete evenings.

Now, instead of just a couple fittings needing to be glued together, there were more. Elbows, couplings, pipe sections, hangars; all needing to be assembled over my head in close quarters and worked around the other infrastructure: heating ducts, wires, other pipes, etc. And the daubers in the cans of purple primer and glue are really meant for larger parts and so hold far too much for little fittings. My hands were stained purple from the dribbling primer. At least the glue, although it smelleD strongly, wAs thiCker, sO it DIdn't dRip as bAdLY. i tHnk i actUAly fIniishedthe joBbefore i ppasSEdout.. maYbee i'LL turNIton neXtYeartoSeEif itActuaallllly lEAksssssssss.

ihateplumnig

Plumbing

I hate plumbing. Can I say that? I hate plumbing. This necessary evil in most homes drives me nuts. Electrical I can handle, but plumbing drives me around the bend. It's not that I can't do it, I can, and I have done lots of it, but that doesn't endear me to it.

Electrical work is so clean. Nothing gets wet. Nothing leaks slowly. You don't have to join wires together every ten feet and around every corner. There's no such thing as elbows and tee-joints, unless you are running wires in a conduit, in which case you are back to plumbing. If something goes wrong, it just blows a breaker or refuses to work. It doesn't soak the insulation and warp the plywood. It doesn't result in large puddles of electricity on the floor. If something goes REALLY wrong, the resulting fire usually burns pretty clean.

Plumbing projects always last a lot longer than originally estimated. I usually have lots of spare parts on hand from prior projects, but none of them ever fit. The pipe glue for plastic pipe has always dried out by the time I need it. The fancy creation I have made out of pipe to get around an obstruction points the wrong way. All this results in extra trips to the hardware store for more supplies. If I have to dig a trench to lay a pipe outside, there will invariably be large stones just under the grass which stop the shovel with a bone-jarring clank. Just below the stone will be a main sprinkler line that I laid a few years ago that I have forgotten about. This main line is no match for the shovel and I end up shattering a section of the pipe. The sudden flow of water instantly soaks the ground and my clothing and I leave a wet trail through the house as I rush in to shut the well off.

The latest project was an outside water faucet that leaked. Badly. It should have been replaced several years ago, but, as you know by now, I hate plumbing. This year the handle started to strip. When you turned the handle, you were not usually opening the faucet, unless you pushed down at the same time.

Yesterday, it was time to fix it. I needed to spray some weeds and it was difficult to turn the water on to fill the sprayer.

I tried tightening the screw holding the handle on. It broke. Now the faucet has no handle. I dug through my spare parts. I actually found a new faucet that fit. Now the chore was getting the old faucet off.

A couple years ago, after another plumbing project which required me to borrow a pipe wrench, Deb bought me my own pipe wrench. A nice big one. Two feet long. It could double as a boat anchor. Armed with that wrench, I attempted to unscrew the entire faucet from the wall. It turned, but the entire pipe turned with it, making the old caulking around the pipe chip away in large chunks. I wormed my way into the crawl space to clamp the pipe down from the inside.

Back outside to give the faucet another go. This time I could feel the resistance of the clamped pipe. The faucet began to turn. Slowly at first, then all of a sudden easily. Looking at it closely, I could see the pipe was still turning with it.

Back into the crawl space to check on the status of the clamp. It hadn't moved. That could only mean one thing. The section of copper pipe hidden inside the wall had buckled and twisted from the force. Not a good situation. Now a half-hour project was turning into an entire day project. Rebuilding the pipe in those tight quarters was not going to be fun. And any more attempts to turn the faucet would most likely break the pipe.

It's here that my "whatever works" engineering philosophy kicked in. I didn't need a new faucet. I just needed a way to stop the water from flowing. I drove to Lowe's and bought a small shut-off valve with hose fittings, and screwed that onto the end of the faucet. The faucet may not close all the way and have no handle, but it doesn't matter anymore. The three bucks I spent on the in-line shut-off valve saved me an entire evening of work, and probably an equivalent amount in new fittings and pipe sections.

I may have delayed the inevitable, probably having to actually fix it if I ever sell the house, but I saved the time for now (an hour saved is an hour earned!). I actually got the weeds sprayed before it got dark.

The Fun Side of Plumbing ... Again

If you have been reading these posts for more than a year, you may recall one that I wrote last summer. Entitled "The Fun Side of Plumbing", it described one of my attempts to teach my boys life skills. The life skill at that time was plumbing. The laboratory was a slow-draining bathtub, and my two students got to see just how fun plumbing can be.

Since that time, we have had a couple other "plumbing labs", one of them being the same bathtub drain pipe which I finally replaced because of its continuing reluctance to make the bathtub water disappear. This time, the lesson was how the force of habit can interact with home repairs. I disassembled the drain plumbing and then drove to the hardware store for parts. In the mean time, Deb told Josh to take a shower as she always does about this time of day. Halfway through the shower, Deb needed to get something from the basement and discovered it was raining in the basement. Deb ran up and yelled through the door at Josh, who quickly stoppered the drain. This reduced the downpour in the basement to a mere drizzle. When I got home, they were moving all the boys' Lego pieces from the big wet spot in the carpet and had a large bucket catching most of the water. In this case, I didn't think of leaving some sort of reminder in the bathtub because I don't usually use it at that time. Josh wasn't helping me with the drain pipe so he didn't realize it was missing. Once things were dried out we had a good laugh.

We teach these things to our boys because we want them to be able to manage a household of their own someday. Including the plumbing. These life skills include the knowledge of what they can do themselves and when they need to pay for a professional. I sometimes wonder how much of these "life experience" lessons actually stick.

This past Saturday, I found out that these lessons actually do stick. Maybe not all of them, but this one stuck enough to avert a small disaster.

Deb and I went out to run some errands on a Saturday morning, leaving the boys at home. When we arrived home about an hour and a half later, David was waiting anxiously in the driveway.

"What took you so long?" he inquired. We thought it was a little strange that he would wait like this; he usually reads in his room when all his tasks are done.

We vaguely mentioned birthday shopping as his birthday is coming up in a couple weeks. But he seemed to be preoccupied with something else so we finally asked him what was up.

"Water," he said impatiently, "we almost had a flood".

When we came in, the boys were talking through each other in an effort to explain.

They heard a hissing noise in the kitchen, and after checking that the burners on the stove were indeed off, they located the source of the hissing under the sink. By this time the water was starting to run out over the kitchen floor, although most of it was pouring into the basement. A pipe had ruptured and was soaking everything under the sink. Josh tried to stem the tide by wrapping it with duct tape (I think he has seen me fix too many things with duct tape), but discovered that even duct tape has its limitations. It will not hold up to water pressure. Seeing that our sink does not have shut-off valves, Josh had the presence of mind to run downstairs and shut off the main water valve to the house. With Old Faithful now settled back down, they mopped up all the water and cleaned up the kitchen.

By the time we arrived home they had things pretty much back to normal.

I guess you could call this a sort-of "life skills pop quiz", and I am pleased to report that my boys passed this one. This kind of test may have been unexpected but it is far more real-world than a scheduled test in a classroom. Hopefully, when my boys are on their own, they will be better equipped to handle those fun little emergencies than I was. I'm pretty handy, but it was a rude awakening when, three days into the ownership of my first house, the toilet overflowed, and, with lots of gurgling noises, continued to run and run and run...

Me and plumbing, we go WAY back.

The Fun Side of Plumbing

Yesterday we had a night where we actually weren't going anywhere or doing anything. That meant it was time to take care of some things that were on the "urgent" list but somehow keep getting pushed back. One of those was the bathroom plumbing. The tub has been draining slower and slower over the last several weeks until a typical shower would leave water standing in the tub for the next half hour. It does wonders for bathtub rings. I have been able to delay this problem occasionally by a vigorous attack with the plunger, which would bring the drain-time to about five or ten minutes. Then it would gradually slow down again.

Time to teach the kids some life skills.

We located a pipe wrench at the neigbor's house, set up some chairs in the basement to stand on, and went to work.

I had David hold a bucket under the pipe while I removed the hangars from the ceiling and let the pipe down from the tub drain. I told him to keep the bucket under the open end of the pipe while I rotated the vertical section to unscrew it from the large pipe at the wall. As the section of pipe tilted downward, the predictable stream of water poured from the end. Only David had the bucket aimed wrong. Most of the water made it in the bucket, but some of it splashed over his hands and onto the basement floor. With the water came some of the stuff that caused the problem. Thick black tar-like goo that the water carried out in little globs. It didn't smell like roses, either.

David let out a shriek, dropped the bucket, which I managed to catch with my free hand before it hit the floor, and clamped his fingers over his nose. "PEWW!" he yelled. "This is awful!" He then swiftly wiped his other hand all over his clothing.

I held the pipe AND the bucket and let him gather his wits about him. He came back in the room with his shirt pulled up over his nose, making gagging noises as he peered over his shirt collar. Since the pipe came apart in the wrong spot, I had to take another section out. This one required considerable force on the pipe wrench, and the free end of the pipe wiggled around substantially, putting all that black gunk everywhere but in the bucket.

I told the kids we were going to take the sections outside and run the garden hose through them to force the gook out. Josh ran out to the barn to get a hose while I carried the pipes up the stairs.

I was just in the garage when Grandma drove up. She had a stack of books in her arms from the library. Lego books. Josh has a library card, but he has Grandma's library card number memorized. So whenever he gets on the computer to reserve books at the library, he reserves the books using Grandma's library card number.

I'm sure the librarians think we have an interesting Grandma. She checks out a lot of books on Legos, robotics, and birds.

Josh came back from the barn, lugging a garden hose. He saw what Grandma was carrying. The next thing I knew, the garden hose was laying midway through the door in the garage, and Josh had disappeared. I guess drain plumbing and life skills still don't hold a candle to Lego robots. I completed the job by myself.

Maybe next time I'll have Grandma come over with a stack of books on Math problems, or spelling words. Or tell the kids we're going to design a robot to remove black gook from the drain pipes. Or just tell them to grimace and bear it.


P.S. Deb says any bathroom SHE uses in this house doesn't have black gook in the drains.