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My Plumbing
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My Plumbing No, not my personal internal plumbing. Although probably at some point I'll talk about that. I'm talking about the plumbing in my house. It apparently is broken. I took a shower in my downstairs bathroom last night. When I got out of the shower, I noticed something no homeowner wants to see. One of the tiles of the drop ceiling was water stained. It was over the sink, across the room from the shower, so it wasn't just excessive splashing from my shower. A little background. I just bought this house two and a half months ago. I bought the house and then immediately lost my job, so I've been basically stuck here all that time. I've come to know the place intimately very quickly, so I knew this was new and not something old I was just noticing. I pushed up the ceiling tile. Or tried to. The drop ceiling is much too low, the tiles don't actually pop up and out like they're supposed to. But this tile was so water damaged it basically crumbled, and so I ended up just tearing it out. Now that the underside of the sub-floor was exposed, I could see three different possible culprits for the leak. Two were copper pipes running across the ceiling. It was nice to see they were copper and not that older galvanized shit they used to put in houses a lot. The third was a PVC pipe that looked like a drain. Since the upstairs bathroom is right above the downstairs bathroom, I cleverly deduced that this was probably the upstairs tub drain. There was no major dampness anywhere that I could tell, so it was probably not the water pipes themselves that were leaking. If they were, there would have been a lot more water and dampness, I figured. So that left the tub drain. So I did what I always do when a home repair issue rears its ugly head. I ignored it. I went to bed and tried to forget about it. Maybe the problem would just magically go away? I got up this morning and took a bath. After draining the tub and getting dressed, I went downstairs to check on the water situation. Unfortunately, the problem had not magically solved itself as I had hoped it would. Instead, there was water all over the floor under the missing tile. So, yeah. The tub drain needs fixing. I briefly toyed with the idea of fixing it myself. I used my Google-fu to find some info on fixing leaky tub drains. I found several websites and a few videos. After a few minutes of reading about tools for removing tub drains and some stuff about plumber's putty, I stopped. I'm a computer geek. I can fix and repair computers, but that's about it. Every time I try a home improvement or DIY repair project, I fail miserably and end up breaking things. Sometimes my anger gets the best of me and I deliberately break things in frustration, thus making the problem worse rather than solving it. So I did what guys like me do when they have these problems. I swallowed my pride and called a plumber. The first plumber I called said they couldn't get anybody out to me until Monday. That's no good, so I called another plumber. He was busy on a job, and said he'd call me back. He didn't. I should have been a plumber. Or an electrician. Or a carpenter. It seems like those guys never lack for work! While waiting for the second plumber to not call me back, I decided to put my troubleshooting skills to work. I'd read something about how there are various points in the drainage system that could be the problem, not just the main tub drain. So I tested it out by... taking a shower. I mean, why not? I've got nothing else to do. Afterwards I went back downstairs, and... no water! So what does this mean? It means the tub drain doesn't leak. That's good! But where does the water come from then? Turns out, from the tub overflow drain. The little drain under the lever that controls the plug. When I take a bath, the water overflows into that drain and then leaks out into the basement bathroom below. So. My course of action was now clear. Stop taking baths. Problem solved! Check it out, I'm a plumber!! As Red Green would say: It's a temporary fix. Unless it works. |
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Years ago when I met my husband to be we had something like this happen at his parents house. They were away for the weekend and we stayed there...unbeknownst to them. We decided to take a bath together. All was well until we were done playing, I mean bathing, and then went downstairs. When we did we could hear watering running...down through the kitchen lighting. Down the wall cracks and through an electrical outlet. We froze dead in our tracks and then ran and turned off the emergency switch to the furnace and the power supply to the the rooms. We mopped water for what seemed like an eternity but probably wasn't. We discussed our story and what we were going to say to his parents. We knew that we didn't "overflow" the tub but we had no idea what the problem was. His father is a plumber/electrician so we knew he would be able to tend to whatever with our hides nailed to the wall. My husband to be told his parents the moment they returned from their trip. He told them that HE took a bath while they were gone and that HE had no idea how the water ended up coming through all the cracks and crevices of the house. Long story short, they believed him and his dad went to work. It was this very problem. The pipe was not lined up with the over flow thingy in the drain so the water would go up into the hole and down through the floor versus in the pipe. Sooooooooooooo...we get all of this taken care of. All problems are fixed, water damage and you name it. Six months later his sister decides she is going to go take a bath. She goes into the bathroom, plugs the tub, turns on the water, LEAVES the bathroom and CLOSES the door. We all think she is in there. She's not!! She's in her bedroom listening to music and reading a book. We are all downstairs sitting at the counter having a grand ole conversation when water starts coming down through the light. Panic came across all of our faces and we flew up the stairs to open the bathroom door. She was NOT in the bathroom and had forgot she turned on the water. This time it was not the pipe. She overflowed the tub and when that door opened, holy moly!! Needless to say, Dad wasn't very happy with any of us that day. Moral of the story, Never take a bath in their house again. Baths were off limits for everyone but Mom. To this day, I have a girlfriend that whenever she refers to me she calls me "Puds" for the big puddles we left that day. We laugh about it so much but we panic when we think of Dad's face when he heard what happened. May your temporary fix work and may you have no long lasting damage from the leak.
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