My dirty little secret

I'm not 100% certain why, although I'm fairly sure it has something to do with the amount Super Mario Bros I played as a child, but I love plumbing. Seriously, I LOVE plumbing. I'm sure somewhere deep down in my soul I have a place that's made almost entirely of rusty pipes, valves, and wrenches.

How much do I love plumbing? Shortly after we moved into our house I decided we needed a new faucet on the kitchen sink. It actually had something to do with the sprayer breaking but it's been a while. So I wedged myself into the funky space under and behind the sink and changed the faucet.

If you're looking for a quick and relatively easy improvement I highly suggest changing a faucet. It looks awesome when you're done, it's totally satisfying, you get all dirty so it looks like you actually did "real work", and it only takes about an hour.

Anyway....Recently we had a major pipe burst. By major I mean that it flooded the neighbors driveway and we were without water for about a week. On the outside I was saying "Holy crap! This is the worst thing that could possibly have happened!" Yeah, I'm a bit of a drama queen. But on the inside, I was squealing like a little girl "Eeeeee! I get to use my tools!"

So my husband set about finding the leak.



It was conveniently located in our neighbors yard under an oak tree. We took turns chopping and digging. One of us had the axe and arbitrarily hacked at the ground till we got tired then the other one shovelled the loose dirt and root bits out of the way. Funtastical-ness.

My mom even came over and helped dig. Eventually we ended up with this.



Upon first inspection what we have is unexplainable plumbing stupidity. What we actually have is the location of the former T joint where my house and the neighbor's house were being supplied with water off the same meter. That elbow doesn't actually have any water flowing in it, its just a dead pipe. The straight pipe with the compression fitting and cap is mine, I've got water flowing nowhere.

First I tried to cut it.



But I broke my tool and ended up just taking the compression fitting off.

This is what I found on the underside of the nipple.



The hole was so big I could seriously put my pinky all the way into it.

Hmm, I feel like I just got some glazed looks when I used the word nipple.

Here,




Better?

I ended up replacing everything from the old compression fitting down with new stuff because I couldn't figure out how to weld steel. ( And, I was getting tired of the idiots at Lowe's talking to me like a mental patient)

So here it is now.



Yeah. I did that. I even used pink thread tape so if anyone else ever needs to dig it up they'll have some clue that a girl did it. And...Yes, that's a brick "holding" it in place. I wedged the brick between the end of the new plumbing and the side of the hole just in case.

Hey, I said I love it, I didn't say I was good at it.

The best part about this is that to have a plumber come out and simply tell us it's broke would have cost $70. Then it would be $400 or more to have them dig up the yard and actually fix the thing. So in the end it would have been $500+ to fix a rusted pipe.

What was the cost doing it myself? About $12.

It would have only been $6 but I had to buy everything twice because I'm solid muscle and I over tightened the first fitting and stripped all the threads off.

Dirty little secret no more!

Later.


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