How much fun is one person allowed to have ?

I have been having some issues with water lately. Call it karma or call it kozmic, it has been giving me grief on several fronts lately. There is the occasional little leak that appears in the bathroom once a year, and then there are the blocked downspouts that cause the gutters to overflow creating a wall of water along the house during a heavy rain. The gutters are over 20 feet off the ground, and my tallest ladder is 14 feet….

The latest and biggest water problem began to manifest itself a couple of weeks ago in the form of a wet spot appearing on the wall of the little half bathroom off the living room. At first I thought it might be a roof leak, as we had been having a lot of rain the result of a couple of nearly spent hurricane that passed over New England. In a few days the rain stopped, however, the wet spot was increasing in size. The wall in question is an inside wall that backs up to the pipe chase that runs between the basement and the top floor. This is not a good sign! I had my suspicions that something serious was leaking inside the wall, but when I would go to the basement and check at the bottom of the chase, there was no sign of water dripping.

Very strange.

The busy schedule of the last couple weeks, (as chronicled in two blog entries that were never finished and never published), prevented me from doing a deeper exploration. In the meantime, the wet spot was getting larger and wetter.
Finally this past Saturday other than karate in the morning we no other engagements scheduled, and I set myself the task of finding out what the was causing the wet spot and hopefully repairing the problem. Rather than tearing out the wall in the bathroom to get to the chase, I chose instead to go through the end wall of pantry closet in the dining room. This of course meant emptying and disassembling the pantry. This was not a bad thing in itself; there were more than a few discoveries of long forgotten items in the darkest reaches. ‘This expired when?’ The pantry contents were packed in boxes and stacked about the dining room and kitchen. I then proceeded to tear out the end wall of the pantry. The pantry being only 15” deep made the task awkward at best, it seems that I am about 14-1/2” wide. It was obvious that this was not the first time that wall had been breached, while the rest of the walls in the house are lath and plaster, this section was made up of thin planks nailed between the studs that showed evidence of having once had lath attached to them.

Upon opening the wall, I discovered why there had been no dripping water evident downstairs. The chase was filled with blown in cellulose insulation, something we had done shortly after we moved into the house. The insulation was acting like a sponge and was saturated with water. I filled several plastic garbage bags with the soggy insulation and hauled them out of the house.Finally the culprit of the wet wall was revealed. The 110 year old cast iron waste pipe (or stack) that brings the waste water from the bathroom upstairs was heavily rusted and cracked nearly the it’s entire length and a steady stream of water. What a frigging mess!! I always say that when you live in an old house you never know what you are going to find behind the walls.
As found at the bottom of the pipe chase..

A trip to the local Home Depot followed shortly. The supplies, 20 feet of 4” PVC pipe, assorted coupling and joints, PVC cement, plywood for replacing the wall, a roll of insulation, and an assortment of sawsall blades for cutting the old pipe. Total cost just under $120.

The first task back at home was to cut the old pipe out and dispose of it. There was roughly 13 feet of pipe to remove. The pipe consisted of numerous sections that were forever joined as one. I decided that I could take it out in two pieces, cutting it first about midway, and then at the top, removing that section first then disconnecting the lower section in the basement where it joined to modern PVC, and then pulling the lower section up, because it had 3 joints in it in the chase that would not fit through the hole in the floor. Cast iron is difficult to cut at best, and wedged into the end of a narrow closet trying to work around water pipes and heat ducts that shared the chase only made the task harder but eventually the pipe gave way. Because of the arrangement of other pipes and ducts in the chase to make the top cut I had to cut a hole in the wall near the ceiling in the bathroom. That cut made while standing at the top of a ladder no less awkward as the one in the closet. Though heavy, wet and rusty the top section came out with little trouble, the bottom section was another thing all together. Wet and rusty and even heavier that the upper section because of the flanges where the sections of pipe were joined, I found it impossible to dead-lift it up through the floor the 2 feet I would need to in order to remove it. With a little head scratching and a piece of rope, I came up with a plan. Tying the rope to the pipe I tossed the other end through the hole I had sawed in the wall. Mrs. and the boy where positioned in the bathroom pulling on the rope while I in the closet grunted, pulled, and cursed as we eventually coaxed the pipe out of the floor. I had scrapes on the insides of my arms from muscling the pipe around, but we had succeeded.

Replacing the pipe was anticlimactic compared to the removal. It was a matter of measuring, cutting and fitting the new pipe in place. PVC pipe cuts 1000 times easier than cast iron, and I think weighs 1000th of what equivalent cast iron does. It took maybe an hour to actual cut, fit and attach the new pipe in place. It all went smoothly except for one small detail. I had neglected to turn the water off to the upstairs bathroom. In itself, that is not a big problem as long as no one runs any water of flushed a toilet. Except the upstairs toilet tends to ‘run’ a bit sending a small but steady dribble of water down the waste pipe. I stuffed a sponge in the end of the cut off pipe, and turning the water off to the toilet. Problem solved. Or so I thought. A short time later while walking through the dining room I felt a drip on the top of my head, looking up I saw a wet spot on the ceiling at the site of a patch where a previous pipe leak had been. I raced upstairs and turned off the water to the entire bathroom. (Big sigh.) The dripping stopped after few minutes.


With help from both the boy and the wife I finished installing the new pipe. Testing showed all the joints to be watertight. (I tested by pouring a few buckets of water down the tub drain, afraid to turn the water on again to the upstairs bathroom.)

I think the clean up took almost as much time at the project itself, having trashed two bathrooms (the living room and the basement one where the pipe terminated), and tracked soggy cellulose insulation thru the whole house. The old pipe now lays on the sidewalk in the back yard; I have to figure out how to dispose of it. The pantry will remain open for some time with a fan blowing into the chase to speed the drying of the walls.

Still confused about what caused the leak in the dining room ceiling, I decided to turn on the water back on to the upstairs bathroom and toilet. Nothing, no leak, nada. It is another head scratcher. In the back of my mind that leak is a time bomb waiting to go off at some inconvenient time in the future.

Dirty, scraped and tired, Mrs. and I celebrated the completion of the project with a long hot shower at near midnight, knowing that we would not be saturating the walls any further.

I have to admit that I felt pretty good when I finished the job, grated there is still a lot of repair work to be done on the walls and pantry, but from beginning to end the whole thing too about 8 hours, there were no insurmountable problems, and only one trip to the hardware store!

I’d like to think that I saved a bundle of money by doing the job the boy, and myself, with help of course from Mrs.. I can only guess what a plumber might have charged for a job like this. The last time I had a plumber in to solder a leaking pipe for me (recall that hole in the dining room ceiling) it cost me $250. This could have easily been a $1500 to $2000 job by comparison.

Job well done.
The dead pipe. The piece on the left shattered when I dropped it on the ground.


Postscript: Dateline Monday morning: While taking the boy to school I notice steam coming from under the hood of the car, accompanied by the smell of hot water and engine coolant. I swing into my mechanic who happens to be on route between school and home. Verdict: blown radiator, thermostat, et al. Cost for repairs $938.00

I tell you; water has it out for me…