Plumbing Paradise

We got a plumbing bid for the new kitchen. The price was…not bad, except they couldn’t start for 6 weeks. The total $$ did not include fixing the ‘backing up’ problem we have every 3 months or so. (Drain lines…aren’t they grand!)

Plumbing…how hard can it be?

My Loving Spouse knows plumbing. He got the ‘up to date’ requirements for our plumbing code….and got to work. The water lines were easy, even boring (says the one of us who was not under the house).

We didn’t want to loose the kitchen sink until we had to, so we just cut out a cupboard, one we didn’t plan to re-use.

Figuring out the exact location of the drain line culprit was going to be tricky, possibly even messy and My Loving Spouse had reason to be concerned. We figured out where we believed the usual ‘blockage’ to be. Cut up the kitchen floor and started to dig.

The drain line was down there somewhere!

We dug, filling many 5 gallon buckets of dirt, that were carried outside to Blue.

It took us most of the day and we filled two tractor loads of dirt to uncover the mess of the drain line….under the old kitchen floor.

New pipes, old pipes and even a few abandoned pipes. Old, old brittle cast iron pipes…we find filled with debris and sediment.

Let me remind you dear reader, that the only way to know one’s drain pipe is filled with debris is to have the drain line open, which means…that you do not have a working drain line, so we kept digging.

It is a wonder we didn’t have blockages more often with the poor shape these drains were in. We used a cast iron cutting tool, along with a saws-all, a hammer and occasionally some ‘encouraging words’ to break the old pipe properly.

The only breaks we took, were to check on Agnes who was due to calve yesterday and a quick lunch, and trips back to the hardware store!!! (Stay tuned…as I write this Agnes is still ‘great with calve’).

Yes, it seems we have a stream in our kitchen. Luckily for us, we have a new floor planned, as the fir did not stand up to the wear and tear of farm life. Today was a first, I’ve never dug in the dirt in my kitchen before.

Other than many loads of dirt I dug out, I also dug out a collection of bones. Some chicken…some not.

The exceptional news is that the new drain line works wonderfully! Don’t be jealous, I know, it is a thing of beauty.

We are very, very tired. However, when one’s drain line is ‘open’, stopping halfway through the job is not an option, but we are done. We can flush and that my friends, is a beautiful thing.

Yes, indeed, we are blessed.