This Space for Rent

How it started/how it’s going

How it started How it's going

Every year we discover /another/ weird trick some previous homeowner did to our poor house. Monday’s discovery was that the cold water feedpipe to the kitchen sink hadn’t been properly taped, so 20+ years of galvanic corrosion between the copper shutoff valve & cast iron pipe had converted the end of the pipe into a block of solid rust. I discovered this when I pulled the spray hose too vigorously after it had – unbeknownst to me! – gotten wrapped around the shutoff valve, and the goddamn thing just snapped off the feed line.

After a few exciting minutes running around trying to find the water shutoff valve (at 6am, without my morning tea!) and eventually turning the water off at the meter, I got the water turned off, the basement pumped out (it’s AMAZING how fast water fills a basement when it’s backed up by 600 feet of head) and could start working on patching our water supply so we’d have most of our water until we hire a professional to rip out all of the goddamn festival of plumbing kludges and replace it with copper and/or plastic pipe..

So behold the kludge de jour; I put a shutoff valve onto the cold water feed running to the kitchen/outside tap/clotheswasher/disgusting basement sink junction, then cut out the pipe running to the kitchen (filling the stub of the copper segment going that direction with epoxy, then crimping the end of the pipe so that water pressure won’t blow the epoxy plug loose) and dismantled the line going to the disgusting basement sink, replacing it with a hanging stub to connect the cold water to the clotheswasher.

The twine? That’s structural; the old plumbing was just hanging off the wall, held into place by the fittings on the disgusting basement sink, the outside tap, and the line up to the kitchen, so I had to make up for removing two of those connections by tying the cold water patches to the (unsupported except for the disgusting basement sink fittings) hot water line.

(It’s a disgusting basement sink because there’s a tangled junction of sewer pipes just below where the sink drain connects to the sewer, so if the waste is ever /chunky/ it tends to jam at that intersection and backwash into the sink.)

Comments


That’s a lot to deal with before breakfast!

Hope the plumbing upgrade goes entirely well, come the day.

Graydon Fri Oct 8 05:49:14 2021