Plumbing 101

It is a strange fate we should suffer so much fear and doubt… over so small a thing. Such a little thing.

Vacations come in all shapes and sizes. Vacations from work, from responsibility, from work, from certain foods, etc. I had decided to take a vacation from projects for a while to deal with the new Wee One. Yes, that is right. There are 2 now. I told the house that we just needed some time to get adjusted to having the new baby before I could pay more attention to it. But just like most older children when the new one comes home, they pee all over the floor in protest.

4 days after coming home from the hospital with our new bundle of joy, I went to the basement to check on some mouse traps that I set to see if we have any freeloaders living with us. Nothing so far, which is a good sign. However the bad sign was the drip drip dripping that I heard coming from the waste pipe near the sewer line. Upon further investigation I found the source. Not a standard crack from age but a crack because whomever installed this thing decided to use a piece of pipe that they had already started to cut. Yes. Because they started a cut in the wrong spot and decided to still use that segment of pipe, we had a leak. Instead of having plenty of pipe wall to deal with standard corrosion, there was a thin wall of copper keeping the water in. Laziness and ineptitude caused this.

Now yes, the hole is tiny and I could have just sealed it up. But....

Now the old and the new shall become one

As mentioned in other posts, the previous owners loved duct tape. I can see getting confused and using it on ducts... but plumbing? Since this was already a mess and that huge old drum trap was always getting clogged, I decided to just replace the entire line. Also the plumbing isn't vented so I could add some air intake valves while I'm at it. Always best to do it the right way even it it requires more effort that patching. That means ripping out everything from the kitchen and bathroom sinks on down.

Now I haven't done plumbing before. The closest I have come to plumbing is buying a new garden hose. This is a waste pipe though, hopefully no pressurized contents, so I figured it was a great place to start. It really shouldn't be that hard. Now of course I did practice, tested some (1) pipe connections, ran through a simulator a few times to get myself prepped. I've got this.

Once I got the high score I knew I was ready

So I started. This is one of those projects that, like most, I was unsure of at the start and well into the middle. And near the end. Once started though, it needed to be finished. The wife was not prepared to lose access to the kitchen and bathroom sinks indefinitely. Something about needing clean dishes and whatnot.

The demo is the easiest though. All I needed to do was remove some pipes. So remove pipes I did, starting with the duct taped one and then moving onto the fun of cutting through the old metal pipes. What I was not prepared for was the smell. The duct tape joint had a nice collection of filth which had matured well with age.

Who needs proper couplings when you have duct tape?

The smell was tremendous. Only to be topped by the fresh sewer line smell once I cut through that monstrous drum trap. At this point I knew I had to work quickly because I now had an open line at the main sewer pipe and two sinks out of order. I also didn't want that open sewer line to stay open. I've seen Ninja Turtles (not the new one, that one sucks), I know what comes out of sewers. 

Something tells me not all sewers are so well maintained and have inns

With all the pipes removed it really was just putting the new PVC together. I had purchased enough straight pieces and differently angled joints that we just needed to figure out which ones went where. Much like an artist saying that just need to remove the parts of the stone that aren't part of the sculpture, I needed to know which pieces of PVC 'belonged'.

My entire rationalization of doing this project was that I can put together a puzzle and this is pretty much the same. Yes you have to prime and glue the pieces together so you need to do it perfectly, but Perfect is my middle name. 

Lies. Its Ronald.

So I set out all the pieces and dry fit them to make sure it would all work. In the pic above you can see an air intake valve. Neither sink was vented properly which meant lots of noise coming from the drain when water goes down. Also the sewer stink that I was mentioning before, that has a tendency to make an appearance in non-vented sinks. Repairs and improvements all in one! The rest of the afternoon was spent doing a giant white jig saw puzzle.

Doesn't get much easier than this

This project was a lot more measuring and cutting than normal. We really needed this to work correctly so I changed my method of eyeballing and praying. In the end, it actually worked out. I was shocked. The pieces mostly lined up. It only took a little muscle at the end to get the final pipes connected. With that I ran upstairs, turned on all the water and then sat. I waited and waited but no water came out of the pipes. I even checked the next two days and the water is still draining properly. We have even been able to use the garbage disposal since that drum trap isn't there. Now I just need to replace the leaky sink and the downstairs plumbing is all set, until I find the next problem....

Leveled up to master plumber. Koopa, look out.

- The Porter -