Unpleasant Surprise

I suppose that when you end your most recent post with “we will see what surprises are in store for me over the next few days,” you’re almost asking the universe to surprise you with something special.  While I‘m going to try to not read too far into this, the universe has decided to surprise me with a foot and a half long crack in our home’s sewage line.  

After opening up the walls in the In Law unit a couple of weeks ago, we found some pretty major water damage, along with clear signs of an ongoing leak.

My rough guess is that the leak has been happening for around 20 years.  I mean, it takes awhile to disintegrate over a foot of wood.  Needless to say, it was finally time to find the culprit.

After putting on my sleuth hat, I took the day off of work and met the plumber so we could investigate the source of the leak.  Naively, the lack of foul odor led me to believe the leak was coming from a water line.  Well, I’m not sure what’s wrong with my sense of smell, but as it turns out we found not one…not two…but three cracks in our sewage pipes.  

There was, of course, the afore-mentioned foot and a half long crack.  

  

Then there was a hole on the toilet flashing (which connects the toilet to the sewage line) that had been DIY-fixed with some sort of putty.  

And finally, there was another hole on the opposite side of the flashing that had not been DIY-fixed.

Now I’m not trying to ‘diss’ DIY home repair.  I mean, I’m a DIY’er and I have the magic of the inter-web at my fingertips.  Imagine in the days of yore, when indoor plumbing was a new-fangled luxury and plumbers were just former stable-hands that were trying to get in on the crazy pooping indoors fad.  It must have been a lot harder to become a properly educated DIY’er.  With that said, purely from a chemistry standpoint, some materials are more porous than others.  I’m no chemist, but my guess is that drywall putty is on the more porous spectrum, therefore, not being the best choice when trying to fix a leak.

With all that aside, there are some positive, and some negative, things that have come out of this experience.

On the negative side of things, our poop-pipe was leaking (for 20 years), resulting in some significant dry-rot in the In Law unit.    This realization meant we had to remove the pipe.  Removing a pipe of this nature is not only difficult, but also a bit gross.

      

The positive side to this whole thing, however, is two-fold.

First, we have a brand new poop pipe that stretches the entire length of the house.

It’s almost a shame to cover it back up with drywall, but I don’t think that visitors will get as much joy as I do looking at this leak-free pipe.

       

Second, I was able to spend a lot of the day working on the floor in the In Law unit while the plumber worked his magic in the house.  I made some significant progress, however, it’s not quite done.  For this reason I’m going to wait to share it when there is a finished product.  After all, I want it to be a surprise.  Just to be clear, the GOOD kind of surprise.