Crack Optional

You know this post is about plumbing, right?!

So if you know us, we swear up and down, left and right that we will tackle any DIY job unless it has three things involved…..water, gas or heights.  We don’t do roofing.  We don’t paint high things.  We don’t mess with gas because we are afraid it will blow us up or slowly poison us in our sleep.  And we don’t mess with water unless it is easily accessible….as in…no buried pipes or things that get drywalled over because dude, water will bring your house down.  There are so many water problems….mold, leaks, rotten materials, fungus….you will die.  Or at least we will.  So we don’t mess with it.  Which makes it pretty awesome that my big brother is a plumber and he will do gas and water fixes for us if I promise him a box of ammo for his gun and a chocolate cookie pie.

That being said…we were in a time crunch for the basement and we had to get some plumbing and electrical done for the basement kitchen.  See that wall right there?  That is where all the action is.  If that wall was a girl, it would be Taylor Swift.

On the other side of that wall, is this….

Yup, that is the storage area and it is basically a long walkway that we cleared out and cleaned up.  We put all our stuff on the other side of that pallet wall (you can see that little makeover here) and this area is the future laundry nook for the basement and available storage for our friends.

We decided to tackle the area ourselves (I use that term liberally because I did absolutely nothing DIYish and we recruited our neighbor, Super Larry!)….Jeremy began by taking off the drywall to assess the situation.

There were water lines and electrical and a gas line….our theory is that the previous owners had a barbecue grill down here that they used to cook and pass through a weird window in the kitchen.  What can I say?!?  When you love your ribs, you love your ribs.

This area in particular needed a lot of work.  Just keep that in mind.

So back to the kitchen.

There was already a drain line installed (THANK GOD!) and so really the biggest thing was to get the water lines so that we could hook up the washing machine (back side of this wall) and get that drainage system installed (nobody wants to manually drain their washing machine) and then also have a water line to the fridge and then in the correct spots for the kitchen sink.

Enter Super Larry.  Or maybe I should call him Handy Larry.  Either way….he lives next door and BUILT HIS HOUSE.  Yeah.  Our kinda people.

So he sawzalled the existing drain pipe and made sure it was flush.

He was gonna hook up this bad boy…

And the rest of the pipe was placed on top (this would be the drain to the sink).  This allows for two water sources to drain into this hole.

Then they got to work doing the other side where the PVC would have to go through the studs…

It’s basically like a marble game where you have to connect all the pipes so that the marble flows down and out.  Except it’s with water.

For the bottom pipe, it needs two holes….one for the water….and one for the vent.  Vents are important because if you don’t vent, there isn’t outside air pressuring the water and waste down the pipe.  Usually you vent through a vent stack….but that is up through the roof and we are in the basement….so we did it another way…more on that in a little bit.

Here is the vent pipe….

It got a mini-vent air admittance valve on top that allows the air to go into the pipe….and still keeps smells out.

Okay so vent done….but now we need water drainage from the future washer….so Jeremy installed a washer drain wall box.

The second pipe was attached to the wall box and then had a P-trap on the bottom….gotta have a vent….gotta have a P-trap….

You can see here how everything lines up.  Super Larry would line everything up and measure….

And then Jeremy would go cut the PVC pipe….

I would then get myself a drink and a snack

So the pipes all fit together and they were attached with PVC cement.  That’s the purple stuff on the pipe….not Super Larry’s blood….

When it was all said and done, the drainage pipes looked like this….

On the other side of the drywall (yes, they cut a whole in a new piece of drywall to fit through the pipe), the PVC stuck out ready to be attached to the drain.

More cement and boom clap tingle….it is all together.

Next up is an entirely different type of plumbing….the new copper lines….

Jeremy was taught how to solder…..

And they put in the new water line for the fridge….

More on that in the next post because I am running out of picture space

For now….here is the end result for those of you that just eat up plumbing and electrical stuff….

I got highlighter crazy and made this for you so that you can see what the guys did that was new and what was existing.

So that is my part one of two parts of plumbing.  I will be back tomorrow with more plumbing….that’s probably the boringest sentence you have ever read on this blog.  It’s up there with LJ’s birth story.  (sorry third born….your entrance into the world was about as exciting as watching an instructional video on sleeping).   Stay tuned!  ha!