She's Runnin' Fine Now

We've been having some plumbing problems this fall. About three months ago I was downstairs in the basement and in the back of the house when I noticed a little water puddle near the back door. It appeared that water was running down the 3-inch drain pipe from upstairs. Unfortunately, the pipe comes out of the exterior stud wall right at the floor joists and I couldn't tell for sure where the water was coming from.

One day, while Sparky was in the shower I went down stairs and could see that indeed the water was running down the pipe from somewhere in the wall and wetting the little pieces of carpet we have at the basement back door to wipe our feet.

So I called in the expert, my neighbor Bruce, who also happens to be brick mason and general contractor. After some discussion and review of the house plumbing we agreed that his men would come and remove a section of brick to try and find the leak source.

So a couple weeks ago they showed up and gently knocked a hole in the brick work to try and find the source of the leak. My fear was that it was coming from the bathrooms on the second floor. We made a hole mid-way up the wall, but no leak. A good sign.

So then they knocked out brick towards the bottom, again I went upstairs and flushed the toilet and ran water. Sure enough there was a small leak in the drain pipe just as it entered the basement.

Somehow the joint of the 45-degree elbow (red arrow) had sprung a leak and every time we would use a sink, shower, tub or toilet a little bit of water would come out of this joint. A little gross!

With the problem exposed, I went to Home Depot and bought just about every pipe, glue and fitting that could possibly be needed to fix the situation. Then with the help of our neighbor Terry and later Bruce, we replaced the leaking elbow.

Then a few days later Bruce's men returned and put the brick back in.

Now the miracle of the whole thing is that I knew the approximate location of where there were some excess brick buried in the yard. Years ago when we were putting in the white vinyl fence, I had dug a hole for fence post. Enlarging the hole to dig out some concrete from the earlier fence post I accidentally ran into several rolls of brick that had been neatly stacked in the ground; kind of like the Terra Cotta solders of Xian, China.

Since taking brick out of a wall is almost impossible to do without destroying some of them, I was lucky to remember the approximate location of these "hidden" brick. Now 10 years later I had to dig a couple exploratory holes before I found the stack brick, which we used to replace the brick damaged during their removal.

So now it's all back together. Let winter begin; "She's Runnin' Fine Now."