When life becomes a sewer......

Sunday was a totally laid back day for TLE and I......I spent pretty much the entire day inside writing my daily blog and reading with a strategic nap thrown in for good measure......but then around 1530 I went inside to see if Nick had turned the upstairs toilet back on......why would I care if it was on, or off you might ask?  Let me backtrack to Saturday....

I mentioned in yesterday's blog that I had spent time helping Nick make some repairs to their home, and one of those was removing the upstairs toilet to replace the old wax ring, which we thought might be leaking, and from all appearances it seemed to be leaking.  The reason for this was Nick had noticed some moisture in the basement coming down the vertical sewer line from the upstairs bathroom, which we sincerely believed was caused by the old wax ring leaking.  We were both quite confident in our repair, but we needed to verify we had solved the leak.  After turning the toilet water supply line back on Nick flushed the toilet as I was viewing the underside of the upstairs bathroom floor from an access point downstairs.....no leaking!  Our elation was short lived as when Nick went down into the basement there was actually more water coming down the outside of the sewer line.....uggghhh!  Less than 24 hours to the home inspection required to close escrow.....we have to get this fixed now!

We deduced that the vertical sewer line was leaking somewhere below the upstairs bathroom and the basement.  We decided to remove a broom closet in the downstairs bathroom hoping it would give us access to view the portion of the sewer line we could not see from the other access point in the ceiling of the hallway outside the downstairs bathroom.....confused?

At any rate, after removing the molding around the broom closet the box that forms the broom closet actually just slid out and gave us a perfect view of the part of the sewer line we could not see, and we immediately understood what was wrong.....there was a crack in the cast iron sewer line about 4.5 feet long and it was no wonder there was water in the basement.......see the picture below.........

 That is one BIG crack!

.....well, with the home inspection coming on Monday we had to get it fixed, so around 1600 Nick headed for Home Depot to buy some new schedule 40, 4" diameter sewer line to replace the broken section......he returned with a 10' section of pipe, two elbows, and a couple of rubber gaskets so we could hook it all up again.  

First up Nick, using his Makita "Sawsall", cut out the bad section, and then we set about to install the new section.......

 The old cast iron section with the crack next to the new section

it was just a matter of gluing the two 'elbows' together then the new section of pipe, before using large rubber gaskets to connect the top and the bottom of the new section into the existing system......by 1900 hours we had the new line installed, tested it by running the upstairs shower, and flushing the toilet repeatedly, and were finally able to declare victory.....

 The new section connected via rubber gasket to the mainline once again

.....this was not how I saw my Sunday ending, but what a whirlwind it was.....the sewer line is repaired and things are drying out once again....you can already see the wood drying out in the right side of the picture (taken this morning) above....the house is ready for inspection!

Thanks for stopping by!