Tag: plumbing

Basement Dig Out – Part Forever

September 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

My last basement dig out post was June 3rd. With the dumpsters and excavator gone we stalled out and decided just to hire the rest out. The concrete contractors we talked to gave us some very reasonable quotes and we were just waiting for the plumbers to get back to us. We finally got a couple plumbing quotes, but they’re really, really expensive.

We’re basically looking for three things from the plumbers: (1) replace the old clay sewer line under the basement floor with an overhead system plus rough-in for the basement bathroom and floor drains to an ejector pit, (2) replace the old lead water service with a new copper line, and (3) install an interior weeping system (aka drain tile) with a sump pit. The new water line in particular involves either excavating pits and horizontal boring or a trench across the yard and the street, so it’s the biggest line item, but the sewer work is pretty pricey too.

We’re going to try and get another couple quotes in hopes of a less expensive option, but time is getting short to get this work done before the cold weather sets in. In the mean time, we’re going to tackle the weeping system ourselves. While it’s the least expensive item on the list, it’s the only one we can realistically do. Even though it  won’t bring the plumbing costs down by a lot, we’ve got to do everything we can if we want to move forward.

Before we can put in the weeping system we need to level the subsoil in the basement. When we dug out the basement with the mini-excavator, our limited experience meant the end result wasn’t what you’d call perfectly smooth. Because it’s all clay, making it flat is extremely labor intensive. We’d held off leveling it until we’d talked to the plumbers because we weren’t sure if they were going to have to dig up the existing sewer and water lines. Now we know that’s not the case and we can get started. They’ll only need to dig a hole in the front corner, and over by the soil stack.

Not level

Not level

The first step was to dig out the corners where we couldn’t get the excavator in close, then go around with a pressure washer and clean up the stone footings. Once everything was cleaned up I used the laser level to measure how close to level the subsoil is. I started working from the front bay window toward the back of the house, focusing on one four foot square at a time. I quickly discovered there’s a gradient of clay consistency from one side of the house to the other, requiring different techniques to level out.

Level line

Level line

On the North side of the house the hard-packed clay is the consistency of old, dried fudge. It’s so dense you can’t slice a shovel through it and I have to use the mattock to chip it away. As I move to the other side, it gets gradually softer, which is why a lot of that side is actually dug too deep. So, I take all the clay shavings from the one side and dump them on the other, then use a block of wood and a hand-held sledge hammer to pound it flat. I thought about using a plate compactor or a lawn roller, but everywhere I need to compact the clay it’s sticky and would make a huge mess. As much as I don’t want to do it all by hand, it’s probably the only way. I drew a line on both the shovel and my block of wood to check my progress as I went, as well as a longer board that I could use to check larger areas. Basically, everything needs to be 6″ below the laser line.

Progress is very slow. I often find myself adding up square footage in my head and breaking it down into percentages, since while the digging is physically hard and time consuming, it’s also mind numbing. Each 4×4 section is averaging me nearly half an hour. I’ve only done about 300 square feet so far, to the back of the first column footing, but just that has been a huge pain over several days.

I’m planning to get the leveling finished over the long weekend, but there’s a lot more work to the weeping system. My hope is that by doing this portion ourselves, we can save enough money to still move forward with the basement this year. After getting excited about our reinvigorated timeline, I don’t want to get derailed out of the gate.

Contractor Wrangling

August 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

For the first part of the year, almost the whole first half, we were going like gangbusters on the house. After we returned the mini-excavator and the last dumpster was hauled away, we kind of ran out of steam. We’d go down to the basement and putter about for a little while, digging up the rest of the disconnected sewer pipe to the catch basin, hauling out some of the remaining dirt piles, breaking up the landing outside the back door, but for the most part, a sense of dread and just being overwhelmed took hold. Digging by hand in the clay soil is just terrible and with our dumpsters gone we didn’t really have anywhere to put it. A series of over-tonnage charges came through on the dumpsters that added up to a lot of extra money. We basically got screwed on the dumpsters and should have gone straight to the hauler instead of using a service.

There were some also simple realities of life going on: our son Derek is going to speech therapy twice a week in the evenings, which occupies a decent chunk of our work time. Until she got a new job a few weeks ago, Sarah was working at a temp job that put a lot of uncertainty into our house budget. As for me, I was just sick of the basement. It’s summer, there are all kinds of things to do, and our weekends were more often than not full of fun activities with friends and family. In short, not much got done on the house.

Now that Sarah’s permanently employed, we’re back to hoping we can move into the basement before winter sets in. The only way that’s happening is if we hire out a big chunk of the work: namely finishing the dig out and pouring the new concrete floor, and the sewer plumbing. So over the last month or so we’ve been in contact with a few concrete contractors, a GC, and a couple of plumbers. We got a couple quotes on the dig out and the floor, as well as the new exterior back steps, but getting a plumbing quote has proven elusive. The GC we met with first said he would give us a quote but he never did, plus a lot of what he said really didn’t align with what I understand code to be, even though he said he knows all the inspectors and does it all the time.

Then we met with a plumber that gave us a whole different idea for how to do the sewer plumbing. We were planning on having our sewer pipe run underground, gravity-fed, with a backflow preventer (since Chicago has a combined storm system and high rain can lead to sewer backups). The plumber told us that the city now has additional requirements for backflow preventers that makes them difficult and expensive, and to instead use an overhead sewer line from the main stack to the front of the house. The basement fixtures would drain into an ejector pit that pumps up to the overhead line. The advantage is that it’s unlikely there would ever be a backup because it’s much higher up, and even if it did it would just back up to the ejector pit. Better still, we could run the whole thing in PVC instead of cast iron (which the City requires for below grade sewer). As a result it would be cheaper as well as a performing better. The disadvantage is we would have a bulkhead along the outside wall, but I think we can make that work. Unfortunately, he also said we’d have to have a trench for the new water main, since the city inspectors want to be able to see that it’s one contiguous pipe.

Unfortunately they still haven’t gotten us a quote, and now they want to come back out next week since their “outside guy” missed the last appointment. Needless to say I haven’t gotten a quote yet. We have another plumber coming out on Saturday morning. Hopefully they’ll both get us quotes; after wasting most of the summer, now we need to get moving on this project, but without quotes we can’t plan or budget.

Plumbing Move

May 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

There are a few drawbacks to living in a house while you remodel it. It takes longer, it’s more complicated, and you often have to spend time on temporary solutions to keep things operational. In this case, the water heater and laundry in the basement needed to be moved up to the first floor so the basement dig out can continue.

Basement water heater and laundry

Basement water heater and laundry

We installed the water heater back in August of 2013. At the time we were getting everything disconnected from the chimney so we could redo the subfloor on the first floor. When we decided to do things the right way and do the basement first, we had to reshuffle things. We considered disconnecting everything and moving out for a few months, but instead we just moved the water heater to the first floor temporarily and rerouted the plumbing. I even managed to hook up the laundry, so we don’t have to go to the laundromat for the next several months.

Relocated to first floor

Relocated to first floor

Getting gas, electric, water, and venting run was a task, but I simplified it by using PEX tubing and quick connect fittings for the plumbing. PEX isn’t code in Chicago, but this isn’t permanent so I’m not too worried about it. Once the new basement floor is done we can move it all back into the basement. I took off a few days from work this week and got everything set up on the first floor for about $150 in materials. The whole house water filter had to get disconnected, but because of how we plumbed it we were able to just bypass it with a few valve turns.

Old sewer connection
Sewer connection repaired
Kitchen drain connected

The next step was to fix the drainage. The long-gone basement bathroom had been badly spliced in where the cast iron stack connected to the vitrified clay sewer line. I repaired that connection with a section of PVC and a rubber gasket. I had to cut out the cast iron and the broken clay. I did both with a diamond grit reciprocating saw bit. Don’t waste your time on the carbide bit. That thing is crap, just spend the extra few dollars. Once that connection was made, I redirected the drain from the kitchen (and laundry) into the main sewer instead of the collapsed line that goes to the catch basin and backs up all the time. When we replace the underground sewer line this will get changed again, but for the time being we don’t have water all over the floor and noxious sewer gas leaking in the basement, which is nice.

Everything removed

Everything relocated

Finally, with everything moved and rerouted, I took up the last section of concrete floor.

Concrete removed

Concrete removed

Now we can finish the dig out! We have nine days left with the mini-excavator before our month is up and we have to return it, so we’ve got to press on and get this thing done! It’s looking like one more dumpster after this one should finish things up, or roughly 2 concrete dumpsters and 4 dirt dumpsters total (plus the 2 debris dumpsters from the garage and back porch demo). It’s been a busy Spring.

Expected Plumbing

April 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

We’ve encountered several plumbing projects since buying the house that were not part of our planned renovations but rather part and parcel of living in an old house. We had the pinhole leak in our hot water pipe, the replacement of our bathroom faucet, and the abrupt collapse of part of our kitchen drain, and I didn’t bother chronicling the recent kitchen faucet swap (the cheap faucet we bought when we moved in started leaking and we got a less cheap replacement). All of these were sudden and unexpected, but the basement drain problem was not. It had been progressively worsening for some time and we had been progressively ignoring it. Well, no longer.

Emily

Emily

Almost two weeks ago our daughter Emily was born (explaining the brief gap in new posts). We’re very excited to have her with us, but it means we’re back on the cloth diaper regimen, which brings me back to the basement drain. Let me explain how our sewer is set up. Our house has two sewer systems: the black water sewer that serves the toilet, tub, and bathroom sink and drains via 4″ cast iron pipe into the city sewer, and a gray water sewer for the kitchen sink and laundry that drains via a 2″ cast iron pipe, increasing to a 6″ clay pipe under the basement floor where it picks up a couple of floor drains before heading into the catch basin in the back yard, where it is joined by gutters and the patio drain. From there it can drain into the city sewer as well. Chicago is one of the bastion cities of combined storm and sanitary sewers. The catch basin is a combination grease trap and local water reservoir to help the city handle the water volume during heavy rains. So we have a manhole behind the back porch (under our grill) and a big brick vault about seven feet deep.

Starting at some point several (six?) months ago, when we ran the dishwasher or the washing machine, water would violently spray out of the top of the drain for the washing machine in the basement. To prevent this, I removed a small pvc screw plug from the basement floor. Now water didn’t spray out, it simply welled up out of the floor and drained to the other floor drain in front of the washing machine. This, in turn, also eventually filled and backed up. Then, during the melt from all the snow this past winter, water started to fill the landing at the bottom of the basement steps, about 6″ deep. Sarah put some bricks into the water to use as stepping stones to get into the basement. It was getting pretty bad.

Removed plug: better than spraying water

Removed plug: better than spraying water

I bought a drain snake, and then I bought a bigger one. As if the problems hadn’t been bad enough, because we’d now be washing cloth diapers, I really didn’t want the water backing up anymore. The water was also pooling at the base of our (very expensive) new hot water heater and I didn’t want it to start rusting.

Previously repaired connection

Previously repaired connection

I bought a cheap USB camera on a 45′ cable to try and figure out what was under the floor. I researched old Chicago sewer systems online. After running snakes down various pipes and floor drains for two days straight, Sarah cut off the already broken PVC fitting just above the floor while I rented a power drain snake from Home Depot. Having direct access to the clay pipe meant that I could now confirm my fear: the snake was pulling up thick, goopy, mud. That’s a fairly sure sign that the clay pipe under the floor has either separated or outright collapsed. Since I wasn’t prepared to start jack hammering the basement floor, I just snaked all the drains as well as I could, put together new PVC connections (including a clean out) at the base of the drain pipe, and called it a day.

New and improved connection

New and improved connection

So far, nothing has backed up since then, so our efforts were not entirely in vain. I still need to clean up all the mud down there. However, I’m not convinced that our current state will last as long as we were hoping. We’re planning to dig down the whole basement floor and replace all of the underground plumbing at the same time. My current timeline put that a ways out (aka years). It may turn out that we can’t wait that long.

Frozen Over

January 22, 2014 / / 2 Comments

We got heat in the nick of time, since it got really cold in early January in much of the country. In Chicago, the low of -16° on January 6th beat records. The second floor stayed nice and cozy, thanks to our new boiler and radiators as well as the attic insulation. The rest of the house didn’t fair as well, and we had frozen pipes in the basement, a frozen washing machine, and frozen condensate line and intake on our hot water heater. Fortunately our hot water heater is fancy enough to detect the problem and shut down, as well as display the problem on the screen, making that part easy enough to fix.

Heater in the basement

Heater in the basement

The frozen pipes, on the other hand, required a bit more work. I never put pipe insulation on because we haven’t had our rough plumbing inspection yet, since I’m waiting until we complete rough plumbing on the first floor. That decision proved short sighted. We had relocated our electric heaters to the first floor and basement in an attempt to keep things above freezing, but it’s so drafty there wasn’t much hope. We wound up thawing things out with a heat gun to get the water flowing, and fortunately didn’t have any pipes burst. I don’t know if that’s because the water filter is able to absorb the increase in pressure or just dumb luck. In any case I added not only pipe insulation but pipe heating cable, which wraps around the pipes and uses about 60 watts, compared to the ineffective electric radiators that use about 1,500 watts each. It has a built in thermostat to kick on only when the temperature is below 38°.

Pipe heating cable

Pipe heating cable

However, before we were able to get the insulation installed everywhere, and because they were sold out of the longer lengths of heating cable, not everything was wrapped, so we wound up having a second pipe freeze despite our efforts. The washing machine was another casualty. Since we neglected to turn off the water and drain the hoses, the water inlet valve froze and split apart. When we got back from our vacation I took the thing apart, found the problem, and we bought a new one and and got it installed. We’ve been catching up on laundry the last couple of days and disconnecting the hoses at night when the forecast calls for sub-zero temperatures. We also put a thermometer in the basement to keep track of the how cold it is down there. The good news is it’s staying above freezing in the basement when it’s 5° outside. I’ll try and determine what the danger point is, though there’s obviously a time factor in addition to outside temperature.

Thermometer

Thermometer

Meanwhile we haven’t made much progress on other projects. Between the freezing, a nice vacation to Cancun, and being sick after we got back, January hasn’t been nearly as productive as I had hoped. Instead of working on subfloor I’ve been taking out the old steam pipes, since I need to get them out before I can finish the subfloor anyway. I may do a post about it, but I haven’t taken any pictures yet.