Bring Out Your Lead!

"I'm getting better!"
"No you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment."

One of joys of remodeling this bathroom is removing the 100 pounds of old plumbing. Seriously, this stuff is heavy. The hot and cold supplies were pretty typical galvanized pipe (not copper), which is pretty dense stuff. But the waste line was four-inch cast iron, which is right up there with depleted uranium in terms of gravitational attraction. I was glad to see this stuff go, particularly as the insides of the pipes had accumulated several decades' worth of, um, accumulation. It was like a heart patient badly in need of angioplasty. (I'm sorry, doctor, we can't save the patient. He's too far gone. We'll have to re-plumb him.)

The charming contraption you see here is the iron toilet drain, which teed off to a galvanized drain for the old bathtub on the right, and to the sink on the left (already removed in this photo). The tub drain had a clever little P-trap built into the line, which you can just see on the far right of the photo. And by "clever" I mean it was a huge pain to remove.

The iron-to-iron joints are done with oakum and lead, such as the slip joint just behind the toilet flange. The galvanized fittings are threaded. All of it is corroded. And just about bomb-proof. I spent some quality time with the angle grinder. It's sort of like reverse welding, with sparks flying and everything, but with the added attraction of lead.

The biggest problem, of course, is that all of this plumbing is raised above the floor, which gives us this charming channel cut right through the middle of the room. That's because this particular run starts at the back of the house. In order to maintain a constant slope the pipe had to angle upward slightly on its way here. (As everyone knows, stuff flows downhill.) By the time it reached the bathroom it was halfway above the floorboards. That explains why the old toilet was raised up on a pedestal. It wasn't for ADA compliance, that's for sure.

Our plan is to cut the drain pipe back as far as the wall, then install a wall-mounted toilet (as opposed to the usual floor mount). The wall mount gives us some automatic height and avoids having to run the drain under the floor at all. It'll just stop at the back wall, a good 6-10 inches above the floor. And, since the new drain will be all ABS, it'll save us, oh, about 100 pounds of crusty old pipe.

The hot and cold supply lines are both PEX, and they're just visible peeking out at the back of the photo. And — mirable dictu — all the electrical will get replaced with brand new grounded Romex, which you can also see in the photo. Gosh, we may even put in a GFCI outlet or two. Imagine: the first safe, reliable, code-compliant bathroom this house has had in 120 years.

I wonder how much money the scrapyard will give me for all the old metal pipe?