Adventures in Plumbing

Permit me to take a brief detour from my usual blog posts full of adorable pictures and stories about Alex and the family. Today I would like talk about 100-year old plumbing.

A couple of months ago I finally got fed up with our funky basement "70s room" which had been tastefully finished in fake wood paneling and bright orange shag carpeting on a raised wooden floor. After a careful cost-benefit analysis and days of hand-wringing, I decided that demolishing the room would neither add to, nor detract from, the value of the house. Furthermore it would provide me with a much-needed outlet for my pent-up tinkering and house projects desires.

As with everything else I've undertaken in this house, it provided me with a wealth of startling and potentially costly surprises. The house has withstood 105 years of do-it-yourself'ers of various skill levels, and corner-cutting of truly heroic proportions.

Along with some clever plumber-cum-carpenter's notching of the 2x8 floor joists to accommodate 3 inch drain pipes, I found this:

The north wall of the basement, looking east and west, respectively. "Octopus" sewer connection in the foreground.

Note the line of moisture where the wall meets the floor. At first we thought it was only the remnants of some past leakage, but soon correlated more wetness with more water usage. Doh!

I immediately had visions of $10,000-$20,000 complete sewer replacement (about 80' from the clean out to the city main in the back alley, most of it paved or under big mature trees) combined with partial foundation replacement. I spent a few weeks thinking about it. One of the few advantages of a 105 year old home is that almost nothing you find in the normal course of things constitutes an "emergency". You can almost always reason your way out of doing anything right away with the old adage, "Well, it's been this way for decades, a few more days isn't going to hurt anything."

Then something amazing happened. Dana suggested that I take on the project. Almost on a whim we were driving home 2 Sundays ago past the Grand Rental Station in Loveland and Dana asked "So how hard would it really be to take out the concrete and dig out the line?" I almost couldn't believe my ears, but quickly estimated that it would be "Pretty easy, probably just a couple of hours of digging"

(What's most surprising of all is that my estimate was actually pretty accurate!)

The BEFORE picture:

The Northwest corner of the house, showing the sewer clean out in the center of the photo

For about $50 you can rent a 60-pound electric jackhammer for the evening. It is remarkably easy to handle. The hardest part was lifting it up and moving it after hammering on each section of concrete. The actual vibrations were not a problem.

Step one - tentative, baby steps:

Step two - whole-hog. Good friend Mike and his girlfriend Nico came over as soon as they heard the words "jack hammer".

It was at this point, once Mike and I had cleared enough concrete to dig down to the old clay sewer line, that we realized the damaged section of pipe was actually underneath the concrete steps where Mike is sitting in the photograph above.

Step three - we're already in too deep, might as well take out the stairs...

By the way, if it looks like Mike is doing a lot of the work, he is. Aside from his avowed love of jack hammering, Mike is also an incredibly nice, generous guy. And Nico put up with it without a single complaint, chatting with Dana and playing with Alex inside while we worked.

Here's what the demolition of the stairs looked like:


When it was all said and done, we dug out the clay line, and a completely separate cast iron line that serves only the kitchen sink.

The original (?) clay main is seen exiting the foundation wall near the center of this photo. It then made a 90 degree bend and connected to the main clay line running across the backyard to the alley, on the right. It was this elbow that had been partially crushed, possibly under the load of the concrete stairs that were poured on top of it with very little in the way of support. In the course of excavation I also found another, abandoned line that continued approximately north away from the house. No idea if this was the original line or perhaps an early connection from the lot to the north of us. Finally the kitchen sink has it's own 1.5" line that exits the foundation at a 45-degree angle, and enters an odd concrete junction on the right-hand side of this photo, before continuing on to the main.

Our neighbor Bob suggested that the kitchen sink might have had a "soap trap" which was the concrete junction. We decided not to investigate further since the kitchen drain had no apparent problems.

Just for fun after we had it mostly dug out, I took a video demonstrating the problem. You're not supposed to be able to see/hear your drain in action...

Here is the intrepid crew posing for a victory shot next to the pile of rubble.

Left-to-right it's Nico, Mike, me, Alex and Dana

After a week of delay, this morning I called our local plumbing shop, Jones Plumbing, and they came out within an hour to replace the elbow and rejoin the clay lines. Jones even dumped a scoop of gravel in the hole for me.

The modern PVC/ABS drain line is SOOO easy to work with!

Here is the scooper truck that dropped off the gravel: I had to take a picture and video for Alex, since he had already left when they arrived.

Here is a video of the scooper truck:

Finally, here is Auntoh Alison and Alex's depiction of what our house is supposed to look like. Note that everybody is happy and there are no geysers of sewage anywhere to be seen.