Saturday, September 17, 2005

Plumbing Escapades

This is a bit late in coming, but we lost water pressure to the house the week before Labor Day due to a pipe breaking (it was made of shoddy material that is now illegal, but what can you do...?). A friend of the family is a plumber, who itemized and priced every step of the repair. He let us know we could cut the price of the repair in half if I did the trenching myself for him to lay a new pipe. The old pipe--and I use the term "pipe" loosely--if repaired only in the place it broke, would probably just break elsewhere sooner or later. The following chronicles what happened:


The line the plumber sprayed on our lawn going from the house towards our driveway.


The line from the left side of the driveway.


The line from the right side of the driveway down alongside the sidewalk to the meter.


In the meantime, what we did for water was, we put a hydrant spigot (at least, I think that's what it's called) near the meter, and attached an above ground hose to it...


...ran the hose along the side strip beside the sidewalk...


...put it under the fence...


...and ran it to this spigot in the back (it's a miracle our dog Brigid, pictured here, didn't chew this thing to bits!).


So the night before Labor Day, I went to Home Depot and rented this Ditch Witch trencher for a day. It was $132, which is considerably better than the $800 we would have spent on labor!


To give you an idea of the size of this thing, I'm just under 6' and am standing on the same level as the tire of the trencher.


The ditch I dug from the tank away from the house.


The ditch from out from the house to the left side of the driveway; we had to get the plumber to go underneath the driveway with a high-powered hose in order to lay the pipe under it without breaking up the concrete.


The ditch from the right side of the driveway to the sidewalk.


The ditch alongside the sidewalk to the meter.


The new entrance of the pipe to a tank by our house, using PVC pipe.


The new pipeline; the PVC will last almost as long as copper (several decades) and is one-third the price. Sweeeeeet.

3 comments:

Anthony said...

Being a Texan myself, I can say that your manliness has increased tremendously because you used machinery/heavy power tools.

Keep up the good work, brother.

Fr. David said...

Heh. Riiiiight. You should have seen me out there, wrestling with that thing. It was fun, though, and really satisfying afterwards, to see it all done.

And the ol' pocketbook didn't feel so bad, either.

Anonymous said...

That was the most detailed entry about plumming I have ever read :)