Water, Water Everywhere

With a long work day on Monday, I managed to remove the galvanized pipe from where it comes into the house, over to the water heater, most of the way to the laundry, and to the kitchen and where I tied in for the addition, and then replace it all with copper. The picture at the left shows a section of the pipe where the worst blockage was, that was causing the low pressure in the kitchen and addition. The small orange circle is the size of the hole that was still open -- about the thickness of an 8 penny nail. But we now have normal water pressure on the cold side in the kitchen, and in the new bathroom in the addition. That still leaves replacing the cold water lines for the old bathroom, a run from the water heater over towards the kitchen, and the laundry area, but we have a functioning toilet, sink and shower, even if they're not in the same room.

Meanwhile, not far away, there are folks who have too much water. Not as much as the folks in Fernley, NV, but too much by any account. We live in the hills, and while we have our own share of drainage problems, our lot is relatively level and stable. Up along Skyline Blvd., the hillsides are steeper, and water does what water wants to do -- flow downhill. The section between Colton and nearby Huckleberry Botanical Park has long had a number of drainage problems, sometimes blocking an entire lane of the road after a heavy rain. The city fixed these problems by the installation of the yellow sign in the picture. But after this most recent storm, it seems the sign was not enough, and water was seeping under the road, and taking parts of the hill side with it. The road itself is still intact, but the folks who live at the downhill end of this gully were apparently not pleased by the arrival of parts of the uphill section in their backyard.

They'll be battening down the hatches when it comes...

We've got 3 storms in a row on the way. We need the rain, but we could do with it spread out a bit more. And the 2nd storm is due to bring high winds with it, which we most definitely don't need. I cleared the roof of pine needles and fallen branches yesterday, and did various things around the outside of the house to prepare, but it looks to be a doozy.

Bad Plumbing Ju-Ju

Given my recent posts, it's probably no great surprise I spent today working on plumbing. What's less expected is that it wasn't the plumbing in our house. My friend Cindy that helps run Oakland Firefighters Random Acts told me the back door of her mom's house wasn't shutting. You may remember about a year ago I did a bunch of work on her parent's house, mostly replacing a burst water heater, but I ended up working on other plumbing, and the back door that had been kicked in by a SWAT team and then replaced by some firefighters with Random Acts (people normally have to replace damaged property like that on their own; the police don't really take responsibility for it). They unfortunately didn't do a great job when they replaced the door, so I had to plane the door a bit to get it to shut. With time, hot and cold, and changes in humidity, it was again no longer shutting, so Cindy said it needed to be planed some more. Well, there was a bit more to it than that. The hinges hadn't been set right, so the door was binding against the inside of the door stop, and trying to close the door had caused the screws in the top hinge to split the wood and pull out part way. So I had to trim the door stop (I did so messily but as quickly as possible), replace the screws in the hinges with longer screws, as well as plane the door a bit.

But there were plumbing issues, too. The faucet in the laundry sink was leaking. Rather than tell anyone, Cindy's mom's caretaker had stuck a plastic bag under it. Over time, the water had gotten behind the block supporting the faucet, and into the plaster and lath wall. I fixed one leak and shut off the water to the faucet, but it needs time to dry out before any more work is done. The wall may need to be redone. Yrch.

And Cindy mentioned that the kitchen sink wasn't draining very quickly. Sure enough, it would start filling after running the water hard for a few seconds. I looked in the cabinet under the sink, and was dismayed to see drain pipes with signs of previous leakage, including electrician's tape wrapped around the middle of one pipe. But I gamely went forward, disassembled the trap and attempted to clean out the drain. The trap was clean, and I discovered that the main blockage was just inside the wall. Unfortunately it wasn't just gunk (though there was plenty of that), it was primarily rust, which neither the snake nor a bent hanger could do much with. I also ran the snake into a clean out down below the sink, and discovered that some where down the line there's stuff slowing things down there, too. At least that's just gunk (I think), but it was beyond what I could get out with the snake. So Cindy gets to call RotoRooter or the like and have them clean it. Though I don't think there's much they can do with the rust-filled pipe in the wall, either. I think that may need to be replaced, and that means ripping open the wall. Double yrch.

The Year in Review

Happy New Year! The last year has been a busy one. Not especially productive on the house, but we've gone from having to go on to the deck to get to the bedroom to having another 0.5 bath. (The other half of the new bath will happen at some point after I replace the old galvanized plumbing so we can get a decent amount of pressure on the cold water side to the addition. It's a daunting task, to say the least.)

The addition got gutters. Far too many people died, including Katarina's dad. I survived a back-to-back mission trip to Mexico and Habitat Build-a-thon (with the Random Acts fundraiser and creating a memorial video squeezed in for good measure). I was in an article in the SF Chronicle. The Thrivent Builds-sponsored house at Habitat for Humanity East Bay was completed. We got a new neighbor. The new bathroom got radiant heat. And now we have another 0.5 bath, which is especially nice for those early-morning ablutions in these cold months.

Here's hoping 2008 will be a happy, peaceful, productive new year.

Cavalcade of Shmë

The plumbing in this house is in sad shape. Not the parts that have been replaced, like the water heater, or the new stuff in the addition, but pretty much everything else is in need of replacement. I've known I was going to have to redo the plumbing to the sink in the old bathroom for a long while. Over two years ago a leaky faucet led to a sizable project replacing things there, and the discovery that the hot water side was completely full of corrosion. Fortunately my good friend Jim had convinced me to replace the plumbing to the shower with copper back when I had that ripped up, but I'd left the sink and toilet supply alone since I hadn't opened that part of the wall.

Since the last blog post, I've finished painting the new bathroom, tiled the floor, installed the vanity, toilet, associated plumbing, and all those little details (minus window trim) that go into a bathroom, and basically got us up to a 1.5 bathroom house. The new toilet is a wonderful thing, a Toto Aquia that has two buttons, one that uses 0.9 gallons for a flush, and the other that uses a full 1.6 gallons. More expensive than the cheapo ones at Home Depot, but it does a better job with 0.9 gallons than many of them do with 1.6 gallons or more. And if we'd been replacing an old 3.5 gallon one, we could have gotten a nice rebate from EBMUD. It was a bit more complicated to install because of the streamlined design, but it looks nice and works great.

After I'd installed the vanity, the drain pipe, and the supply lines, with much fanfare I turned on the hot water faucet. Sploosh! as expected. After some adjusting of the pipes in the trap, I turned on the cold water faucet. Dribble...not as expected. We've had low water pressure on the cold side in the kitchen for quite some time, but I hadn't worried about it too much since the kitchen plumbing will be redone in the remodel. But I'd tapped into the water lines near the kitchen, and it turns out the cause of the low pressure is further up stream than I thought. D'oh!

The plumbing in the old part of the house is a mishmash of galvanized and copper, with dielectric unions and bronze fittings scattered about to connect the two. I really need to replace the galvanized all the way out, or I'm going to hit this problem again in the future. Sweating dielectric unions is a royal pain, so I decided I didn't want to just replace a little of it to start, but the water pressure in the kitchen and new bathroom is low enough that there's no point in finishing the shower until I do something about it.

So this morning I took Katarina to the BART station (our friend Tess is borrowing the Golf for a while, since her car died) and headed on over to Home Depot. A long time and several hundred dollars later, I left with a bunch of new copper pipe and fittings, came home, and went into the basement to get started. And realized that more work and more parts would be needed. I'd missed counting one of the branches (ironically, the cold water supply for the old bathroom that I've known for years I was going to need to replace). But I also noticed that the pressure regulation valve is badly corroded on one end. So before I pick up Katarina this evening, it'll be another trip to Home Depot...