More Plumbing fun

As I was writing that last entry, little did I know that the plumbing in the main bathroom was planning a revolt! The diverter that switches the flow from tub to shower suddenly got very hard to turn and would not completely switch from tub to shower. Again with an old house you never know what you are going to find when you embark on repairs. I disassembled the faucet, with a little help from a rubber mallet and in spite of my vast collection gaskets and washers, nothing in my stock fit. The next stop, on the next day was a to the local Home Depot, when I showed the core to the clerk. He said that they didn’t carry that part but suggested some possible solutions. I shuffled through the washer and gasket selection, choosing a few that I thought might work with some alterations I also checked out what replacement faucet assemblies were available. I didn’t relish the thought of replacing it, but I was fully prepared to do so if necessary.

After dinner on the next night I settled in to attempt repairs. With the help of my trusty Dremel tool, I shaved and drilled the washers to match the worn ones. With great anticipation I reassembled the faucet. Victory denied! It still didn’t work correctly. After several tried at taking it apart again and tweaking and readjusting (and spraying my self with water) it was obvious that nothing I could do would make it work, so I gave up, consigned to the task of replacing the entire faucet assembly. I returned to the Home Depot the next day. But before springing for the new faucet assembly, I returned to the parts department, where upon I discovered a book that listed a wide variety of faucet cores complete with illustrations of each one. Clutching my worn part in one hand I went through the book page by page comparing it to the photos. Wonder of wonders, the part was listed in the catalogue! Miracle of Miracles, the part was in stock, although buried on the rack. Mentally dope-slapping the clerk who had told me the previous day that the part was unavailable, I left the store a much happier guy. That evening I was able to install the replacement core in about 15 minutes, familiar as I now was with the assembly procedures. The best part of all; the thing worked perfectly when I was done.

There is a lesson in there somewhere let me know if you figure it out. I was just pleased that I didn’t have to do a major repair.

As a footnote, as I was taking the garbage out to the curb at 7:15 this morning, I ran into a gentleman who had grown in the house from 1937 to 1961. He is now a college professor but occasionally stops by the neighbor hood just to see what has changed. we chatted for a few minutes, he mentioned that he was happy to see the house still standing after so many houses had fallen to disrepair and were demolished in the 70's. I joked that I was surprised as well as it was a money pit and that the house required constant attention to keep it from falling down. He retorted that some things never change, it was a money pit back when he lived there and he remember his father and his brothers doing the same thing 50 years earlier.

Picture: First Church of Roxbury, built in 1803 is the 5th 'meeting house' to be built on this site. It is the oldest wood frame church in Boston The 4th meeting house on the site (1746 - 1803) was the location from which William Dawes departed as one of the three riders on the night of April 8, 1775 to warn Lexington that the British were coming. The other two riders were Paul Revere and Samuel Prescott.

Running as Fast As I Can

Let me see if I can rescue this blog. I started this entry almost a week ago, but time and inspiration has transpired against me.

3/30/09
So spring seems to be in the air finally, the light is right anyhow, all we need is the warmer weather. We have been opening the windows a crack just to get some fresh air in the house. It is just a little too chilly yet to really open them wide and air the place. Other signs of spring: I have a sudden urge to clean. It might be the change in the light; suddenly all the dirt and smudges show. The previous Sunday I was wiping the kitchen counters after breakfast and looked at the cupboards. Before I knew it I had the Murphy’s Oil soap out and had was scrubbing down the cabinets from top to bottom. I think that the same thing must have affected Mrs. as she decided to scrub out the refrigerator after we got home from the grocery store. Now if it would just inspire the boy in the same way.

Whatever the force is that dives the urge to clean also seems to be awakening all sorts of slumbering urges. All of the ignored home maintenance and repair projects are also coming to the surface. I had planed to take care of at least one of the indoor jobs over the winter break, but entropy set in and I accomplished almost none of what I had planned, the bedroom remains unpainted, and the wall in the lower bathroom still has a large hole in it resulting from the major plumbing repair job last fall.

Of course there are the outdoor projects now are added to the list, and that doesn’t include the garden and yard projects. The front porch needs some TLC, and the shed over the back door has some rot at the bottom. Both are projects that have either the easy solution or the more complicated one. In both cases, I can disassemble them and rebuild them using mostly new materials or only remove and replace the badly worn or broken parts. Both have their advantages, the first solution is more expensive, and also means it should last longer before the next deeded repair. The latter solution is should be faster and cheaper but living in a 135 year old house, one never knows what surprises on may find when you start taking things apart. One can easily end up doing the complete rebuild anyway. Thinking about all the projects that need to be done around the house, I could easily take the summer off and do nothing but home repair and maintenance. It is kind of tempting; I think I will check my vacation accrual.

Before undertaking any major projects, I still need to get thru the next few weeks. There are multiple events every week until the end of the month. The previous couple of weeks were no different, with the added complication of the boy being on spring break for tow weeks both Mrs. and I were able take a few days off to keep him busy, but he also spent a few days home alone as well. He doesn’t seem to mind that, but it isn’t something I like to do if it can be avoided.


So in the last couple of weeks a wide variety of events have taken place in the theatre we have seen a local community school talent show, an a-cappella group competition, a student production of Into the Woods and a lecture by author and nutritionist Michael Pollan. The latter was sponsored by the campus office of special events and was expected to be a very popular event. In the planning stages, to make sure that it was well attended, they distributed 50 % more tickets than there are seats in the theatre. When I found that out I protested, asking them what they were going to do when 700 people showed up for a and event with only 600 seat. They suggested that they just stand in the back. I explained that state law dictates that the fire department dictates what the capacity of the space is and that state law does not allow us to exceed that. Having worked in theatre for most of my adult life and having been a theatre manager for the last 7 or 8 years, audience safety is rule one, and the particularly hit home when a few years back when a night club in Rhode Island burned down killing over 100 people. It is one area in which I will not compromise. They were finally convinced that they needed to have overflow spaces for the potential 300 additional attendees. The day before the event, I got an email from one someone in the upper levels of the administration asking if they could forgo the reading of the fire safety and evacuation procedures before the event because it seemed ‘amateurish’. I explained that is wasn’t my call and that it was required by state law, and then emailed them a link to that statute in the state code.

I don’t think I made any friends with the organizers on this event.
It just galls me that the administration would bring in a speaker whos' principal theme is food safety, but then will turn around and want ignore all the safety rules set in place to protect the audience at the same event. I don’t think anyone got the disconnect.

For all the trouble, the event went off very well. They begrudgingly abbreviated the fire safety announcement, but did it never the less, and the over flow spaces were packed nearly to capacity, with a total attendance in all spaces at well over 800! I felt vindicated after that.

Picture: Dillaway-Thomas House: built around 1750 is was the parsonage for the First Church of Roxbury. It served as General John Thomas headquarters during the the seige of Boston 1775-1776. The city almost tore it down in 1927, in order to build a school on the site. The residents protested and the school was built around the house.

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…