Sunday, May 24, 2009

4 stores and 82 years...



82 years is how old the pipe was, and 4 stores was how many places I went to get the parts. They're replacing our water main, and one of the city crew told us he wasn't sure how our vintage galvanized supply pipe was going to fare. Here's the valve at the property line, after I cut the pipe, and removed the piece. There was a step in the pipe, I removed that with the new one, and just sloped it from the street to the house. It's supposed to be 18" deep, I think it's closer to 12" at the house though. I don't think the ground even freezes that deep here, hasn't been a problem for the life of the house.



I thought that there was an adapter to 1" pipe, which was why I ended up going to 4 stores. I think the city side is 1" and the residential side is 3/4". Some of the threads were broken off the end of the piece I took out. I thought they'd be stuck inside the valve. They were disintigrated, so there wasn't much holding it on.



Here's all the joints inside sweated together. We have 2 shut off valves now, eventually we'll run 3/4" to the water heater. We haven't really had a problem until now, so we'll probably leave it for a while.



Here's an old listerine bottle I found while digging. Looks like it had a cork stopper, it's been under our water line for 82 years.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This looks eerily familiar. We just removed all the pipes from our 78-year-old house. They were all old, crumbly yet still insanely heavy. “Cake” is the word that comes to mind, just not the sweet, spongy kind.

I’ve been following your blog for a while now. You guys are amazing – renovating, raising children AND documenting. We’re almost a year into our renovation. It’s a classic Mike Holmes story. Old house + 70-plus years of DIY renovations = My worst nightmare. I can go on and on.

Keep up the great job and blog posts. I love reading about the progress, especially when there’s very little on our end :) Cheers!

April IV said...

that's amazing derek!!!!!!!!!!