How things progressed on my house

In my last post I talked about the repairs my house needed. Like most repairs these came up all of the sudden. My house does not have a basement, so these problems came up when my neighbor's sewer line collapsed and he had to have a new sewer line installed. As you might understand is a huge project and it did cost him a lot of money, well a lot money to me. During the project he found out he was not hooked directly in to the city main sewer line. His line was actually hooked in to mine. That is when we found out my line was running slow and would back up in to his line. I accessed my crawl space to investigate the matter under my house and that is when I found out my water main shut off valve was leaking. I then talked to the plumber who was working on my neighbors house to see how much that would cost to fix. He said because my water line was galvanized pipe he could not fix my line he would have to install a new copper line to my house and a new water main shut off inside my house. I talked to the plumber three times about my project and every time I talked to him the price went up. When it got up to the point to where I could not afford it I felt like I was between a rock and hard place.

I kept looking at the leaking valve and kept thinking 2500$ for just one leaking valve, that is just ridiculous. It was at this time my ex was leaning on me real hard for money. I really didn't need the extra stress from her as I felt I had enough problems of my own. During my inspection under my house I also found I had a kitchen sink drain pipe that was also galvanized that was rusted through and was also leaking real bad. that repair was not in the plumbers estimate.

I then worked up a action place as how to effect the repairs on my house. For the leaking valve I went to Home Depot and bought a new ball for my water line and some fittings for my kitchen sink. I already had some 1 1/2" plastic pipe that I could use to replace the galvanized pipe. To fix the water line I had to go to Harborfreight and buy a pipe thread tap set to re-thread the pipe after I cut the old valve off. It took my only three hours to fix the water pipe and about 12 hours to fix my kitchen drain pipe. access to that was really bad and I ended up have to cut holes in my kitchen floor to have access to hook up the new pipes. As soon as I get my kitchen floor patched up things will be back to normal at my house.

It's time to stop planning and get to work

I have bought most of the materials for my home the first problem I am going to tackle is the drain pipe under my kitchen sink. Like I said before I can't get under the house to fix the pipes so I am going to have to tear up a section of my kitchen floor. Once I have the floor opened up it should be no problem in repairing the pipes. Hopefully I will have this job finished this weekend. Next Saturday I plan on replacing the valve on the water main coming in to my house. This problem is more involved. The plumber wanted to run a new line from the main shut off valve by the street. I really can not afford a job like that. What I plan on doing is cutting the galvenized pipe behind the ninety degree elbow behind the shut off valve. Rethreading the pipe and replacing all the worn out valve and all the galvenized pipe to the water meter. So far I have spent senty dollars in parts and tools for the jobs at hand. That includes a pipe thread die set from Harbor Freight. I will keep you posted as to the progress of the jobs.