So I did the rest of the plumbing checks today – trying to work out where the water’s coming from. It does seem that the bath was the source of it all. I suspect that at some point in the past the water heater leaked pretty spectacularly, and no attempt was made to dry that out.
Pulling that drywall off revealed unpleasant, but dry drywall and timbers that are not as rotten as I’d expected. Pulling off the drywall around the kitchen sink…? Well, it looks like all the leaks were related to waste water (which explains the unpleasantness of the drywall that I ripped off).
The highly observant of you will note that this ‘design’ of waste water pipe requires the water to flow in a non-traditional direction to exit the building. And it’s not merely uphill here.
It’s uphill here too:
Also, there’s these two holes that I have no idea what purpose they serve:
I mean, I know some traditionalists put screws into them. But that is very old fashioned. Clearly, now, they’re just used for kind of ritual purposes.
Still, despite its utter shittyness I hooked it back up. At least partially:
Yes, the beauty of that is unsurpassed. I think it took me a whole hour to build.
The plan here was that I’d remove the bathroom sink today. This would allow us to get at another area where it looks like there’s been a fair amount of leakage. Again, I suspect it’s waste-water, not fresh water, related. But until I yank the drywall it’s hard to say. Unfortunately, while my hands were just beginning to feel sore again so I was feeling a bit hesitant anyhow, another problem arose. The valves under the sink, the ones to turn the water off? They don’t do anything.
Which means that, like the shower (which has no valves), I’ll have to turn the water to the house off completely, then I’ll have to remove and blank off the plumbing for those bits. I’ll have to go wander the aisles at a plumbing place and see what is available here. In the UK I’d have thrown a couple of compression fitting inline valves in, because they’re always handy to have around. I’m hoping something similar will be around and not too pricey.
The main reason for my little jaunt over there today (rather than resting my aching hands) was to ‘fix’ the broken piece of car decking for the asbestos people. Since I’m not meant to enter the rat highway crawlspace until after it’s de-ratted got a new vapo(u)r barrier, this ‘repair’ has been achieved by screwing a piece of 2×4 into the failing board and spreading the load across a bunch of other less rotten boards. This has pulled the board back up level with the others, and it doesn’t seem to move.
I couldn’t find hazard tape though (at least not obviously, and it really ought to be obvious!). I was probably not looking in the right place, but I ended up just slapping some yellow insulation tape on the edge of it.
Still, the good news is that after a few days off my hands are feeling better and not hurting just to move, even after taking down some drywall. I think I’m just going to have to be a bit careful with myself. Also, our ‘new’ chopsaw that we bought about 6 months ago seems to work (and has a really nice blade on it).
