The Life of a Troll

For the do-it-yourself homeowner, here are a few tips I've learned about working underneath the house:

1. As a warm-up exercise, get on your hands and knees and crawl around the outside of your house in a clockwise direction. When you get halfway, lie down on your stomach and crawl the rest of the way soldier-style.
2. When you're ready to go back (or just realize you've forgotten a tool), reverse the process, crawling counter-clockwise.
3. The reason you're circling around the house is because, of course, the furnace is right in the middle, blocking any shortcuts. (See item #7, below.)
4. Working on your back under the floor with pipes in your face, nearsightedness is a benefit. In fact, it may be a job requirement.
5. Claustrophobia is just plain not allowed.
6. Don't work on anything directly overhead while lying on your back. Nasty stuff tends to fall into your face, mouth, and eyes, even with eyeglasses. Instead, move slightly to one side so all the dust can fall in your ear.
7. Remark on the incompetence of every plumber, electrician, and builder who came before you and wonder why, oh, why did they have to put that pipe/conduit/joist exactly where you're trying to work?
8. After you come out from under the house, shake off like a dog coming out of the pool. You don't want to track that stuff in.
9. If possible, wear pants without pockets. As you inch along in the dirt (see #1) your pockets will act as shovels, collecting an amazing amount of dirt and debris. You'll be 5 pounds heaver than when you started.
10. Always wear a dust mask or respirator. You may not think you need it, but careful examination of said mask will reveal all the stuff that didn't go into your lungs and nose.
11. Blow your nose after every trip under the house, but don't look at the Kleenex. Seriously.
12. Hardhats are for sissies. Just learn where the 7,459 exposed nails are.
13. Buy fresh batteries for your flashlight. In fact, buy several flashlights.
14. Christmas tree lights make excellent crawlspace lighting. They're cheap, small, not overly bright, and the LED kind don't get warm and don't use much electricity. Best of all, you can string them along the floor joists to make path lighting, like the floor of an airliner.
15. Item #14 requires a working AC outlet under the house, of course.
16. Safety tip: Learn to recognize the difference between gas lines and water pipes. Both are metal, but one is more fun to cut into than the other. Practice identifying them in dim lighting.
17. Never take down more than one object with a cord (work light, extension cord, long rope, etc.). They will inevitably get tangled together and you've got approximately zero space in which to get them untangled.
18. Banging your funny bone feels just like an electric shock. Don't panic.
19. Avoid power tools. There probably isn't enough room for them, the corded ones are more trouble than they're worth (see #17, above), and they'll just get dirt in the motors. Besides, a screwdriver hurts a lot less than a cordless drill when you drop it on your face.
20. Place all of your parts and tools in a small plastic box and keep them there. This allows you to push/drag everything at once, rather than hand-carry twenty different items while you're crawling on hands and knees.
21. Always, always put tools directly back into the box. Never set them down, rest them on your stomach, or let them out of your sight. They will disappear. The box will get very dirty and crowded, but at least you'll know where to look for your pliers.
22. Sharpies work upside-down. Crayons work even better.
23. Gloves are worse than useless. They scoop up dirt, which falls out when you reach over your face to work.
24. Do not drink excessive amounts of coffee, tea, or cola before starting an under-house project. Just sayin'.
25. Large screws require large screwdrivers, and large screwdrivers have long handles. There is no room for such tools under a low crawlspace. Deal with it.
26. Open all containers to one side, not over your face. This is especially true of liquid containers, and most especially of ABS cement.
27. Take twice as many small screws, wire nuts, couplers, or whatever little pieces as you think you need. It's a nuisance to go back for one more.
28. Prop open the door/hatch to your crawlspace with a brick or other handy object. Otherwise, the door will blow shut just as you've reached the furthermost recess, and it gets really dark in there.
29. Whenever possible, cut a hole in the floor near where you'll be working. This allows daylight to come through and admits fresh air, but most of all it allows you to place tools near the hole so you can reach up and grab them later. With practice, you'll develop a pattern so that you always know that the #2 Philips screwdriver is on the left, the flashlight is to the right, and so on.
30. Your cell phone should be among the items reachable from the hole. Just in case.
31. Sandy soil has a remarkable ability to swallow objects. If you think rainwater soaks into the soil quickly, try dropping a pair of pliers. Or that little screw you really needed to finish your project. Now I understand how ancient cities can disappear so thoroughly.
32. I'd make a great poltergeist, what with all the banging, grunting, and swearing.

Duct, Duct, Go

With most of the plumbing now out of the way, it was time to tackle something different. Not any cleaner, but at least different.

The downstairs/restaurant kitchen isn't heated. Presumably, it stayed warm enough when they were cooking all day, or they just stayed out of the kitchen on off days. At any rate, there aren't any heat registers in that part of the house and it gets a bit cold in the winter. We keep the door to the kitchen closed, and we blocked off the waiter pass-through. Even though there are two bathrooms (and a storage room) in there, we rarely use them when it's cold. For the most part, we've treated the downstairs kitchen as, um, cold storage.

No more. Since we're pulling up the floor in the kitchen anyway (more on that later), this seemed like a good time to add a heat register in that corner of the house. Another trip to the hardware store! I got me all the bits and pieces I needed, including insulation, ductwork, fittings, fasteners, and so on. A new adventure awaited.

Cutting the hole in the floor was easy, especially since there was already a hole nearby. That allowed me to reach through the first hole with one hand while placing the duct and the register with the other. The plan was to tee the new duct off of another nearby duct about 6 feet away. Over at Home Depot, I got me a 6-foot length of aluminum duct and a similar length of fiberglass insulation. But over on the next shelf, they had a 25-foot length of already-insulated ductwork for the same price. Hmmm. Four times more than I need, but hey, free ductwork!

The weird thing was, the 25-foot length came in a 3-foot box. How does that work?

The answer: Stand back when you open the box. Sproing!!!! Massive jack-in-the-box, complete with fiberglass overcoat. Swell. Now I get to drag this big snake around with me as I crawl under the house to splice in the new ductwork. Flashlight in one hand, hacksaw in the other, screwdrivers, knives, duct tape, and whatnot stuffed into pockets, it's time to inch along the crawlspace. Naturally, the new duct goes right where the clearance is most narrow and congested, so I'm working on my back with gas lines, water pipes, and our spanking new drain maze all right in my face. I got to spend some quality time with the dark underside of an old house.

Now I've got about 19 feet of excess ductwork that I can't fit back into the box. Anybody need an extra heater vent?

And Now For Something Completely Different

We do occasionally leave the house and go shopping, you know. Otherwise, we'd miss important stuff like this.

At one of the finer retail establishments in the area, we stumbled across this little gem. Yup, that's genuine "Larry the Cable Guy" brand beer batter mix for fish. "Just add beer" it says on the box. So I gotta wonder: Is it really beer batter if you have to add your own beer?

And what marketing department thought that Larry the Cable Guy was the ideal spokesman for their product? Maybe the budget had run out. Or he's the company president's nephew. Or cable guy.

It gets better. The selfsame store also stocked Larry the Cable Guy Beer Bread mix. Just add -- you guessed it -- beer. And butter. Which sounds to me like it's a box of flour and baking soda.

Note that the boxes are cunningly printed in different colors, blue for fish batter, red for bread mix. Wouldn't want to mix them up. For people who pour beer on all of their food.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the upside-down box marked "Light & Fluffy" is not one of Larry's. It's another brand entirely, for Red Velvet Pancake Mix. Not cake; pancakes. I think they turned it face down because nobody wanted to see what that looks like. And if you look really closely, you'll see that it's marked, "Best by 01/24/2011." By my calculations, that was over two years ago. Shame, really. I only make Red Velvet Pancakes when they're at their best.

Did the Earth Move For You, Darling?

This will look great on the resume.

Kathy and I had so much fun moving 12 tons of broken concrete that we thought we'd branch out into dirt. Last week, removing the concrete uncovered some old, forgotten plumbing in the backyard, some of which was still in use. Disturbing the dirt collapsed some of the oldest pipe, so we had to call the plumbers to replace it all. That became a two-day, two-man job, with one plumber crawling under the house while the other kneeled outside shouting directions. "This way! More to the left!"

To save a bit of money -- and because I'm stupid that way -- I dug out all the old pipe myself. The plumbers charge plumbers' rates to dig holes, so I figured that my unskilled labor was as good as theirs. I trenched the backyard to a depth of about four feet, piling the loose soil where (I hoped) the plumbers wouldn't need to work. The result was an ankle-breaking trench of death, sure to trap unwary trespassers, large animals, or visiting guests to the B&B next door.

Once the plumbing was completed -- thanks, Marc and Alfredo! -- Kathy and I got to fill the trench back in. Easier said than done. Mostly, that just means shoving the loose dirt off its pile and back into the hole whence it came. But you have to stop every so often and pack it down. Otherwise, it'll slowly sink and make ugly lumps in the backyard when you least expect it. So in keeping with the unskilled labor theme, we walk all over the dirt every few minutes and try to pack it down. It's a funny-looking dance, but we enjoy it.

The other half of the project is, naturally, digging new holes! At the same time that Kathy's tamping down the dirt from our plumbing adventure, I'm digging out the dirt from the ramp that runs down the side of our property to the side street. We're trying to even out the slope here in preparation for making it a proper ramp, so that we can roll the garbage cans down it safely.

So here we are, two grown and outwardly intelligent adults, shoveling dirt in opposite directions. I dig up dirt from the ramp, fill a wheelbarrow and take it to Kathy, who then throws the dirt back into the trench. For variety, we sometimes trade places. Digging a hole to fill another one. Isn't this the definition of futility? It's what my Dad would call donkey work. But by golly, we're good at it!

16 Tons and What Do You Get?

...another day older, but no deeper in debt!

Kathy and I have finally removed all the busted-up concrete from the backyard. It took four trips to the dump, and more than a few scraped knuckles, but at least it's behind us now. Last Saturday we filled up the pickup truck twice and made two trips to the dump. Mother's Day was Sunday, so the dump was closed. What are we supposed to do on Mother's Day with no access to landfill? Sheesh.

Believe it or not, we hauled a total of 8,000 lbs. of broken concrete. I'm surprised that tiny backyard could even hold 8,000 lbs. of concrete, but the scales don't lie. The truck gets weighed on the way into the dump and weighed again on the way out, and they give us a little slip marked with the difference. The loads averaged about 2,000 lbs. (1 ton) per trip, so 4 tons total. And we did it all by hand, bucket, sledgehammer, and wheelbarrow. Do I know how to show a girl a good time, or what?

Actually, we've moved about 24,000 lbs. in total because we moved each chunk three times: Once from its original location to a big pile in the backyard. Then, from the pile to the truck. Then once more tossing it from the back of the truck into the landfill. So that's three moves per piece for a total of 24,000 lbs. in a week. What fun.

The bright spot: The local landfill only charges us a flat $5 per truckload of concrete, regardless of weight. That's because they resell it to contractors. In fact, they have separate piles of busted-up concrete depending on whether it's got rebar in it, or bricks, or any other "contaminants." Ours is the clean stuff, so we get off cheap.

Oh, and the other thrill is that we always "treat" ourselves to drive-thru fast food whenever we take a load to the dump. It seems only appropriate.

Drain Teaser

Pop quiz: How many pipes do you see in this picture?

Click on the photo to enlarge it, and see if you can count all the drain pipes. Go ahead... we'll wait...

The correct answer is: eight. Yup, we have 8 different sewer pipes leading out from under the house. And that's not even counting the ninth one you can't see in this photo.

Don't believe me? Check out the image below to find the ones you missed. The bad news is, most of those pipes are made of cast iron, and iron rusts. Pipe #8 is even older. It's clay.

This all became suddenly relevant on Thursday when I moved away the last pieces of concrete and started smelling... no, not that. It smelled like dishwasher soap. Turns out I'd started the dishwasher about 15 minutes before heading outside. Now the dirt's all wet and smells like soap. Uh-oh.

I thought this old plumbing had been abandoned long ago. Nope. About half of these eight sewer pipes are still in service, even though a few of them are almost 100 years old. The packed dirt had been holding them together, and once I removed that, they crumbled apart. Good thing sewer pipes aren't under any pressure or they would have blown apart long ago. Instead, they just kind of quietly leaked into the ground, unbeknownst to any of us.

Call the plumber. He goes nuts trying to figure out which pipes lead to where -- and why. Then he whips out a cool pipe-inspection video camera called a See Snake. You send the camera down the pipe and watch it on a little color LCD TV screen. It sounds disgusting (these are sewer pipes, after all), but it's really kind of cool. Sort of like a mole's eye view of the world.

The more the camera explored, the more pipes we found. It seemed like every few feet the pipe would branch off in yet another new direction. Some of the pipe was new ABS, some was iron, some was clay, and some was just plain gone, held together with rust and packed dirt.

While scoping out one section, the plumber says, "I can see that this is where your washer drains." How do you know? "Well, we can tell if a sewer pipe is used for a bathroom or not, and there's no, um, 'evidence' of a bathroom on this line." Oh, I get it. Sorry I asked. It's also about this time that I notice the plumber is wearing black rubber gloves, and never touches the camera directly.

After an hour or so of exploration, we effectively map out the proverbial plumber's nightmare you see above. Our best guess is that the house started with very minimal indoor plumbing, circa 1893, then gradually added fixtures in the 1930s and 1960s. Apparently it was easier to run new waste pipes instead of tapping into the existing ones, so now we've got a hodgepodge collection of vintage plumbing from different eras. All eight eventually feed into one ABS pipe that makes a 270-degree bend and goes out to the city sewer line -- and even that is new. Remember, this house had no direct sewer connection at all until we bought it. It just drained into the neighbor's house.

Now the single pipe leads all the way around the back yard and out to the side street. It's the long way around, but you know the old saying about flowing downhill.

Mystery Goop

Can anybody tell me what this stuff is?

Today I found some chunks of this white waxy stuff buried in the dirt underneath some concrete. It's snowy white and about the consistency of Crisco. I'm amazed that it's still soft and sticky after all these years. I don't know when this particular slab of concrete was poured, but it's probably at least 50 years old. This white gunk has been underground all that time.

These samples have a dimple pattern on them because the underside of the concrete included some broken-up pieces of pottery or something that was patterned. That may be a clue. Was there some reason this gunk was stuck in this particular spot? Is it some sort of modeling compound? Preservation material? Lubricant? Sealant?

At any rate, I've set the stuff aside until I figure out what it is. It's very soft and soapy and tends to come off on my hands, so I'll just rinse it with water and put it out of the way. Any suggestions are welcome.