Old Stone House

With the water meter moved and the laundry tub installed, the time had arrived to address the plumbing; on this night we were going to fix all the waste pipes. Whoever had installed the original waste pipes had done a good job; in fact, all of the plumbing in the house was done well, it just wasn’t done very elegantly. Rather then try to hide pipes in the walls or ceiling, all of the plumbing had been installed without camouflage, residing below the floor joists, rather then between them, (as seen in the bathroom reno) and travelling from point A to B in the most direct route possible. The previous owners had built enormous bulkheads to conceal the pipes, but that only perpetuated their ugliness, and limited head room.

When we refinished the ‘master’ bathroom, we had the luxury of shutting off the water to one part of the house without impacting the rest of it – day to day life continued. In the case of the basement, we needed to shut off all of the water to the house, and would loose the use of our kitchen, bathroom and laundry-room. Therefore, as straightforward as this job was, we had a really tight time constraint.

I took a trip to the hardware store and purchased every possible fitting I could imagine, in every size, and in triplicate. (…as we have young children, we typically do all of our work in the evenings – there is nothing more disparaging then ripping the house apart only to discover at 1:00a.m. that you are missing an integral piece.) Reciprocating saw in hand, I slashed through the first drain pipe at 8:00p.m., and had finished cutting out all of the pipes at 8:03p.m.

For the next five hours I carefully measured, cut, and glued together the ‘black plastic hydra’ until I had successfully reattached all of the bathroom/kitchen fixtures to the sewer. All of the plumbing was now neatly tucked between the joists, without a single notch being cut. Any pipes that needed to run perpendicular to the joists did so along the perimeter of the room. The basement is not perfectly square, and the walls have been re-poured, so there is a natural widening of the room towards the ceiling. In many cases the difference between the ceiling and the floor is greater then 4 inches, so the piping around the walls will now hide in the cavity created at the ceiling when the new walls are erected.

Waste pipes done, supply lines to go!