Category: Random Projects

Drain Problem

As with most things in the house, the drain plumbing is atrociously wrong. There’s a cast iron soil stack that’s mostly ok, except it ends in the attic a bit shy of the roof. There’s new PVC that ties into another cast iron soil stack that does make it out the roof, though it has some holes in it. The base of the PVC is cracked off about a foot from the basement floor and has a smaller diameter PVC pipe going into it. It also has some side drains, one of which is broken off.

In the above picture you can see the problem. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, we didn’t have any problems with this until recently. I think it was so caked with dirt that the back pressure never managed to escape. Maybe it was just time, maybe we bumped it during demo or something, but a few days ago we started getting water out of the side drain when we did laundry, hence the soap. However, as you can imagine it didn’t smell like laundry soap. It smelled like festering sewer water, which is exactly what it was.

Because the pipe is snapped off and literally cemented into the ground, there isn’t a clean way to fix it. I tried prying off the outer ring to get something I could screw onto, but didn’t have any luck. I didn’t want to crank too hard on it and wind up with a much bigger problem, so I went to the hardware store and played with the PVC fittings for half an hour, at one point having eight different inter-connected pieces in my hand. I finally settled on four pieces that I could combine into several possible solutions. My past experience with plumbing has taught me to over prepare so I don’t find myself back at the hardware store return counter multiple times in one evening.

Drain repair

There’s a good chance that we’ll need this pipe when we move the laundry back to the basement, so a more permanent seal wasn’t in the cards. I decided on a 2″ to 1-1/2″ rubber gasket adapter, followed by a cleanout and cap. The gap at the top of the pipe that the smaller pipe fits into I filled with spray foam in a bid to prevent gas and possible water from escaping. It’s far from pretty, but like much of what we’ve done to date it’s temporary. It only needs to last a year or so until we come back and re-do it all. I’ll let it all dry out and then run some water through the washer to make sure it doesn’t leak. Then I can sweep up the mess. In the mean time I sprayed the hole thing with a generous helping of disinfectant to hopefully cut the smell. Blecgh.

We’ve been making some little improvements to our living space as the larger projects continue. Sarah and I’ve been ripping down drywall in the basement, and I’m sure I’ll have a post about that before long. For now, though, here’s some things we’ve been doing upstairs to improve the amount of storage.

There’s basically two closets on the whole floor.  There’s a big one in our bedroom, that’s taken the role of pantry and general storage. We got some shelves for that closet and loaded them up. Even so we wound up taking a lot of stuff downstairs to store in one of the empty rooms. The other closet is in the front bedroom (if you can call it that; it’s not very big). We put in a couple of rods and some shelves for our clothes.

Pot Rack

The pot racks were a clear need early on. We don’t have a ton of cabinet space but we do have a ton of kitchen stuff. That helped a lot, especially after we learned the trick of putting the lids on the handles, which freed up a bit more space in the cupboard. We picked them up in a couple sizes from IKEA.

The kitchen was still a problem, so another trip to IKEA and some screwing and gluing later we had a new kitchen cart to hold some of the overflow and give us a bit more counter space that doubles as a cutting board.

Kitchen Cart

With the kitchen under control, the next project was putting up a coat rack by the front door, since our clothes closet in the front bedroom is doing double duty. I used the folded post-it note trick to catch the dust as I drilled the holes.

Drilling Holes

The coat racks were from the same trip to IKEA as the kitchen cart. We also got a big box of screws and wall anchors that went along with it. That place is great when you just need something cheap to get the job done. I used a level to space them properly and keep the height the same, but rather than use a pencil I just drilled against it. It seemed to turn out all right.

Wall Anchors

Of course, the last step was putting them up and trying them out.

Coat Rack

I think it turned out pretty well. Of course, if all the projects were this easy and straightforward the house wouldn’t be quite so daunting.