Plumbing Nightmares and Plaster
By Joe at 19 January, 2009, 2:42 pm
So it’s been a while since This Old New House has been updated, but we haven’t made much forward progress, so there hasn’t been much to take pictures of. What we HAVE been doing is resolving / getting started resolving a few plumbing issues.
Saturday morning I got home from Darreck’s house (where I stayed after DJing Friday night) and Gretchen was stressed about the basement. Apparently all water that goes down any drain had been shooting out of an open pipe that is down there that the washing machine drains into. The washing machine would do the same thing, and that’s quite a bit of water. We stopped using water for a bit and thought it had been resolved, but by Saturday night it was back to flooding the basement. I called my dad and he made plans to come over Sunday morning first thing and see what was going on.
The way the plumbing is set up is that because there isn’t any water upstairs, all water runs into one pipe that is pitched to run out to the septic tank. On Sunday morning we realized there was probably a clog in the pipe leading out to the septic, so we went to Home Depot and rented a snake and borrowed a pressure washer from my grandfather to try to flush the pipes out. The snake was only 25 feet long, and not long enough to make it all the way so we ended up, after a lot of time and dirty work, calling a plumber anyway. He had a 50 foot snake and pushed the clog out and everything is back to working properly! Ugh, what a mess. The plumber was nice and came out for an emergency visit about half an hour after we called on a Sunday afternoon during an Eagles championship game. I highly recommend ASAP Plumbing in Quakertown for emergency work (if you need it).
I also started walking around talking to the neighbors about the public sewer line and figuring out how to connect to that in the best way in the not-to-distant future, so we don’t have to worry about this at all anymore. The only problem is that we’d have to run pipelines through my neighbors yard to the street. He seems okay with it, but we probably have a lot of political nonsense to sort out with the township before we can do any of that. It’ll be expensive, but I think in the long run it’ll improve the value of the house and definitely save us some headaches in the future.
Besides that, the living room has been sort of on hold. I’ve been patching up rough spots and sanding when I can. I’ve started cleaning the wallpaper gunk off of the molding so that we can prime the walls and then move everything in from the other room so we can finish there. There’s just not enough time in the day for everything, and Gretchen’s been a little sick and now that she’s feeling better I think I’m getting it. Hopefully it passes. We need to do some painting. On that note, I forgot to mention we found Zero VOC primer at home depot. Olympic makes it. That will definitely be our next purchase for the walls. I painted the walls in the kitchen with Zero VOC paint and there was barely any terrible paint smell at all. It’s not good for you to breath that nonsense in forever.
So after spending the entire weekend on plumbing problems, I’m happy that we’ve temporarily resolved them and can resume the living room. It’s also been snowing pretty regularly here and it’s great. Philadelphia would only ever get rain, though this morning there was some snow there!
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Oh my. I had a plumbing nightmare like that last year (http://diyinsanity.blogspot.com/2008/02/doh.html), only most of the mess was restricted to the laundry sink. Similar result — tried snaking it myself, ended up having to call a roto rooter-type to come with a bigger snake.
Glad we got it fixed, your right it was one crappy job to have to do! Pun intended. Just let me know if you need help with anything, always there for you!