plumber's crack

So before I dive into how we fixed our plumbing problem, let me explain what was really going on. All the waste water pipes in a house need to be vented to keep fumes and gases from building up inside the pipes. Typically, there is a straight vertical pipe that is intersected with the waste pipe from the toilet forming a 'T' where the waste water goes down and any fumes go up...but not in my 103 year old house. In my house, the wall containing the vent/waste pipe upstairs doesn't line up with the one downstairs and, because the pipe was likely added at a later date, there is a bend in the vent portion.


You can see above where the leak was due to the broken pipe. What was leaking was very fortunately not toilet waste water, as that is piped in below the leak. The top of the vent pipe is open to the elements which would typically allow any rain water to run down the pipe and out of the house with the waste water. When the pipe cracked, this allowed rain water and any condensation build up to run down the pipe and into our kitchen. In addition, the roof is not watertight where the pipe runs thru, so rainwater was also traveling down the outside of the pipe and into the kitchen. This explains why a toilet waste water pipe was leaking when it rained.

We called in the professionals from Three Amigos Plumbing, and after a quick visit, they had a game plan and would be back to fix the issue the next day. In the meantime, we had a homework project to cut a hole in our bedroom closet so they'd have access to attach the new portion of pipe. We considered it pretty lucky that the pipe went thru the wall between the bathroom and the back of our closet so we had the option of removing the toilet tank to put a hole in a remodeled bathroom in a very visible place or putting a hole in the closet behind all of our clothes. Not a tough choice. So that night, after removing most of the clothes and shelving system, Bryce went to work cutting a hole in what we thought was drywall but was actually a plaster wall.


So now we had a hole in our kitchen ceiling and one in our bedroom.



The next day the plumbers got to work and our house, of course, threw them some curve balls. The weight of the 20 or so feet of 4" cast iron pipe above the cracked portion was not supported anywhere. It simply rested on the pipe below, which is likely part of the reason for the crack in the first place. Since the broken pipe was to be replaced with a newer PVC version which would not hold the weight, it needed to be supported somewhere above. The plumbers needed to extend the hole upstairs until they ran into a part they could somehow anchor.


The horizontal 2x4 toward the top of the hole is where the weight is now entirely supported. The two metal straps toward the bottom of the pipe is where the old cast iron meets the new PVC filler. We now had a small hole in the kitchen and a large hole in the bedroom but the pipe was fixed.


We decided to leave the hole in the kitchen ceiling until the roof is fixed/repaired/replaced this spring so that a new patch job wouldn't be ruined by any potential further rain leaks. For the bedroom, instead of trying to patch the wall in the closet, we figured we'd simply line the entire back of the closet in plywood. This actually solved two problems as it covered the hole and added the needed additional support for our shelving system which was really burdening the plaster it was hung from.


two sheets of plywood and a few coats of paint later and it was as if it had never happened



In hindsight, it may have been worth looking into cedar boards instead of plywood but I don't know how much the market around here cares about cedar closets.