Calling Mario & Luigi

The word "plumbing" comes from Latin plumbium, the Romans' word for lead. That's because Rome used lead-lined pipes in its famous aqueducts, which may explain the high incidence of mental illness among later Roman emperors.

I'm happy to say we have no lead pipes here. The mental illness, however, is still very much in evidence.

I'd gotten the plumbing in the 3rd-floor bathroom about as far as I could take it, so we called in the professionals to finish the job. It wasn't a big job; it only took one guy just over a day. He connected the three fixtures (toilet, vanity, bathtub) to the existing drain pipe and extended the new PEX for the hot/cold supply. What you see here is the three-way split where everything branches out to its destination.

Venting presented a problem. All drain pipes need a vent pipe so that you don't create a vacuum every time you let the water out. Vents let in air and prevent the "gurgling soda bottle" effect. Normally, vent pipes go straight up through the roof, but we didn't really want to do that (read: the plumber didn't really want to do that), because our roof is pitched at 45 degrees (i.e., 12 in 12) and nobody was eager to climb out on that. So we used air-admittance valves (also called Durgo valves), and these work great. You can just see a white one peeking out of the center of the upper photo, and another one for the vanity to the right. The bathtub gets its own. too.

All of the exposed plumbing is copper, which should look fairly nice and period-correct, while all the hidden stuff is either PEX or ABS. We've now entirely eliminated the old pipes from the upper two floors. The only remaining iron pipes with lead seals are under the ground floor. A project for another day.