Saturday, November 24, 2012

plumbing emergency #4

I planned to work on the bathroom sink this morning. I crawled under the house to size things up. What did I find? The drain gasket on the bottom of the tub held and stopped leaking. The drain pipe from the overflow had a small drip and when I tightened it it only got worse. So I crawled out from under the house and got some gasket material and sealed up the leak. Then I noticed the real problem. The toilet was leaking and it was bad. I promptly went to the surface and claimed that we needed to disable our only toilet for a few hours.

I cut and yanked the toilet from the floor. It was really disgusting under there with someone else's filth. Tabitha cleaned while I made the run to the home depot for the myriad of things I needed to do a proper job. We were gifted a homedepot card and I managed to spend half of it right then.  I came home to Matt visiting. I had to get the toilet working so I got right to it. I reset the toilet and proceeded to visit with Matt. He got to see the house in this state.

We went to blue bottle coffee, I brought Tabitha and Tristan drinks back. He is really sick with some viral cold. A little hot chocolate encouragement always helps. Once Matt left I started on the sink plumbing. What a leaky mess. I assembled the new vanity from Ikea to see where I need to bring out the water and drain not to interfere with the drawers.

I tore open the wall to see what I was in for. What a mess. The drain line was plumbed up hill and needed to be redone to drain properly. Also the old galvanized pipe was leaking behind the wall. Time for another total re-plumb job.

I needed a second trip to Homedepot for the new larger list of stuff. Copper fittings, abs pipe and fittings hardi-board to cover the entire mess properly. After several trips under the house I cut out the old galvi pipe and installed new copper lines. Kassi was a huge help. She waited by the entrance to the crawl space for me as it was getting dark. I needed her to relay instruction to the upper world. The drain was the most difficult part. I needed to install a P-trap in a spot where there wasn't really room for one. I installed half of it in the wall with a special p-trap that has a removable bottom plug. This =accomplished the need to trap sewer gasses and afford future maintenance.

Hopefully, tomorrow brings a new sink in the bathroom. Then I can start on the kitchen sink. We need to have at least one working sink during longer periods of construction. The kitchen sink will take a few days to sort out. I shall start that on Thursday night.

4 comments:

Darryl Iorio said...

It’s always nice to have a plumbing savvy person in the house! :D Neglected plumbing cases can get worse over a short span. And before you know it, you can’t handle the mess anymore. And this thing is messy, literally. On another note, thanks to your home depot card, you were able to deal with the problem with much-needed urgency! :)dd

Unknown said...

Ooh, when you look at the picture, you can probably say that it’s not just some routine plumbing work. Even so, there’s no need to fuss over this since you can work these things out yourself! So how was it? I hope that you’re all done with the construction. The holidays are coming, and what you need to do now is to relax! :D

Unknown said...
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Omelay said...

Alex, thanks, not routine plumbing work... Visitors, illness, accidents and impending holidays have slowed progress to a near stand still. I'll be back blogging soon.

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