Out With the Old, In With the New

The plumbers are mostly done. At least, that's what we're telling ourselves.

The only absolutely necessary bit of plumbing in this whole project was to move the "bar sink" about 24" to a new location. Simple, right?

Except that we thought we'd take the opportunity to right some ancient wrongs. The house has a lot of really old pipes, and some of the nastier ones were about to break or rust through. So we decided that all the old plumbing was coming out. We told the plumbers, if you can reach it and it's not modern, it comes out. And on a three-story house with two kitchens and three bathrooms, that's a lot of old pipe.

But it's for the best. Once they started following some of the old pipe upstairs, downstairs, and through walls, they discovered some nasty stuff. The waste line from the third-floor bathroom, in particular, was cracked clear through and so rusty you could knock chunks off with your fist. Ewww.

So that's all gone, replaced with modern ABS. On the supply side, most of the hot- and cold-water pipes were badly corroded, so they've been replaced with Pex, a modern flexible hose. Terrific stuff, Pex. Buy stock in the company.