A Stinky Situation

You may remember during our insulation day that some plumbing problems were uncovered. When we finally had a plumber come pay us a visit, what he found was very interesting indeed. There was definitely a leak in the sewer pipe and it was definitely somewhere between the second floor bathroom and the basement. After some measuring and estimating, the plumber did this to the wall:

Fortunately this is inside a closet. And even a closet we don't use much--usually it stores our out-of-season coats and random stuff. Still, this was no small hole:

Here I am, for scale.

For that, the plumber charged us about $100. I can put a hole in the wall for free (and probably by accident), but I suppose that a professional hole is far superior. He explained that sewer pipes for houses built in the 1950s came one of two ways. The better (and more expensive way) was a full pipe. The cheaper and more fragile way was with two half pipes soldered together. And of course that was what we had. And we had a crack about the width of a finger. Having hammered a hole in the wall, he left for the day.

Begin round two: the plumber came back another time, much earlier in the day, to take care of all the work ahead of him. He shut the water off to that part of the house, cut out the leaky pipe, and put in a PVC pipe. And that was that. The scary thing is that at some point, this might be the fate of our whole house's plumbing system. The other scary thing was, of course, the price, but we won't get into that here. Let's just say it cost far more than just making a hole in the wall.

The expense didn't even include fixing the hole. Rather than try to replace the plaster, which sounded incredibly hard, we decided to build an access door. We know there's a pipe there, so why cover it. And anyway, this is the back wall of a usually-full closet. So we picked up a nice aspen board at Lowes's that barely even needs sanding (they have a much nicer lumber selection than Home Depot), and will screw it in place through the studs. Maybe one day we'll even paint everything. But again, it's inside a closet, so maybe we won't.

In the end, we're very happy that our energy team noticed the small leak and that we could fix it before anything got damaged. If left unfixed, this could have rotted the wood and caused a mold problem. Plus...well...remember that what was leaking was water making its way between the toilet and the sewer... So really that's just nasty and should not be in the walls of our house!

And now, house, please no more excitement and unexpected costs! Kthxbai!