The Lesson I’ll never forget

We made the purchase of the house and got the keys, and we had our apartment for a couple months still. The wife and I used this time to our advantage for painting the kids’ rooms and other things that were SO much easier without furniture in our way. My daughter’s room, once peach-orange, is now pepto-bismol-pink. My son’s room, once painted with the local school’s color theme, including black, is now, with the help of three coats of thick high-quality primer, Wedgewood blue. I replaced most of the curtain rods, I took down old ugly light fixtures and replaced them with new ones, same with the ceiling fans (the one above the master bed was installed incorrectly, and the electric work on these fixtures around the house was sloppy at best).

One particular thing I wanted to fix in this period of time before we moved in was the upstairs bathroom’s cold water flow. Or lack of. The hot water would flow nice and fast, but the cold water was just a trickle. To draw a bath to a good temp, it would take probably close to 3 or 4 hours, and a shower was pretty much completely out of the question. The toilet, also connected to the cold water supply for this bathroom, would take around half an hour to fill after flushing. The previous owner (PO) had lived with it this way since they renovated the room, 4 to 6 years before we moved in. How? I haven’t the slightest. There is a makeshift shower in the basement, which I had to use once before fixing the upstairs bathroom, and I couldn’t imagine having to use it once more, let alone obligating my wife to! 4 to 6 years with low-pressure cold water in the upstairs bathroom, affecting the shower/bath, sink, and toilet. That’s the 1 in the 1.5 baths in this house! We figured after checking out how the water travels through the house that this being the last room in the house that the water reaches, there had to be a clog in the cold water pipe somewhere between the upstairs bathroom, and the first-floor bathroom just below it. This sort of problem could be caused by someone striking a copper pipe with a hammer while putting up the walls and squashing it closed, or at a weld point some of the soldering metal might build up inside the pipe while it’s melting, creating a clog undetectable from the outside of the pipe, or a similar problem with glue if they’d married the copper pipe to a PVC pipe. So we had to get in there and see what was going on with the cold water pipe. The process went this way: Step one was to remove the bathroom sink vanity cabinet to gain access to the floor. This is MUCH easier to type than it was to accomplish. The PO apparently had a very unhealthy relationship with caulking. The vanity countertop was not only held down by bolts, but it had been sealed in like fort knox with white caulking! With old houses, there are no ‘true’ 90 degree corners. This is ok if you bear it in mind while installing corner-hugging cabinetry, but this vanity’s countertop had true 90 degree corners. The PO had made up for it’s lack of fit by filling in the gaps (up to 1/2” gaps) with caulking! So I spent a good several hours working on removing the caulking, nearly slicing my hand open several times in the process. Once we got the countertop removed (after disconnecting the sink & faucets – I’m learning!), step two was to neatly disassemble the structure that held the drawers in place. With that removed, and wrestled up into the attic for short-term storage, we were down to bare floor with a drain and the water pipes sticking out. The base flooring was jig-sawed just enough to let the pipes through, and now step three, we had to remove the wood from around the pipes. So the world’s best Uncle-in-Law and I took to tearing the floor apart, looking to see if we could figure out where the problem was. The plan was to cut a rectangular panel out so we could inspect the pipes beneath the floor, solve the problem, and then place the piece of wood back down in its place. Oh if only it had been this easy! It became evident that this was not going to be an option when we discovered that the floor was diagonally laid 2x6 planks (‘true’ 2” x 6” planks), made of wood that could pass for hardened steel. My U-I-L and I jig-sawed our way though the planks around the pipes to see if maybe (hopefully) the problem could be detected at that spot; maybe one of the joints that ran the pipes up into the sink was faulty? Unfortunately there was no eureka moment at this stage. The rest of the bathroom floor had had ceramic tiles laid down (ugly UGLY tiles, but a job well done), and the sub-floor there was regular old plywood. I called down to my wife,
“Hey sweetie, you don’t like these ceramic tiles in here do you?”
“NO! They’re ugly!”
“So I’m going to be eventually replacing them with new tiles right?”
“I guess, yeah!”
“OK!”
I looked at my U-I-L and said “grab a crowbar and a hammer, we’re stripping this floor!”
OK, ok, so maybe we deliberated a little longer than that, I think we thought it over for a day or so. My U-I-L and I walked through the house, and we were determined that the problem area in the cold water pipe HAD to be somewhere in the upstairs bathroom floor as it forked out to go to the toilet and sink as it’s straightest path went towards the shower. This was the first and last junction where there was any problem. This HAD to be it. I chipped off the first floor tile, then got to about half-way to the shower, then worked my way over towards the toilet. We took turns, the U-I-L and I, and we cleared the floor of tiles and cement baseboard down to bare plywood all the way across the floor from the vanity, alongside the shower, up to the last few feet where the toilet is. I figured we’d leave the toilet in place for the time being. Pri-or-it-ies.

At this point, my wife and I had been in the final stages of vacating the apartment, moving into the house. My wife needed my help loading the U-Haul truck and I had to leave. My U-I-L said if I was OK with it, he could stay at the house while I went and cleaned out the apartment, and he could cut through the floor and open up a panel while I was gone. I was baffled that he was asking permission to do me a HUGE favor, and sputtered back at him “Yeah, that’d be ok!” Fast forward about an hour or so, I got a phone call from him:
“Hello?”
“Hi, I got the floor up, I can see the pipes where they split, I’m going to go turn off the water and cut into it, I just wanted to make sure you were ok with that before I started cutting.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, thanks very much!”
So I hung up and started packing more stuff from the apartment into the U-Haul truck. Fast forward less than 5 minutes, I got another phone call from him:
“Hello?”
(long pause)
“Hi, uh…”
“Hi there! How’s it all going?”
“Umm… well I’ve got some really good news, and then I’ve got some really really really bad news.”
“ok?”
“Well, you see… the good news is I got your cold water running perfect.”
“WOW! That’s great! Thank you!!”
“And well the bad news, we just tore up the floor in your bathroom for no reason at all.”
“…huh?”
“I went to close the water valve to shut off the water before I cut any pipes open, and the valve knob turned about a quarter turn then stopped closed.”
“hmm?”
“the main cold water valve in the basement that feeds the whole house was barely open all this time. That’s why the water was low on pressure.”
“b..b…but… the rest of the rooms in the house have good water flow…?”
“it was open up enough to have good pressure up to the ground floor, but the pressure wasn’t enough to make it all the way upstairs.”
“Oh, no! So we just… for no reason…”
“yeah.”

At this point my wife was in absolute hysterics, laughing herself into a fit that took her to the floor. I think they call this 'ROFL'. I was chuckling because for one thing I didn’t know what else to do… I was going to rip the floor up eventually anyway, those floor tiles were so horrible we couldn’t stand them, but the replacing process had sort of been pushed into effect now. The other reason I was laughing, and not getting all red-faced and furious about the waste of my time and resources, was because I was thinking about the PO living with this for the last 4 to 6 years!!! The lesson I learned here is if I EVER have ANY water pressure issues, ALWAYS check the valves FIRST and FOREMOST! Lesson learned.

At least I thought to leave the toilet in place!