Now flushing with hot water...

On Sunday I began to remove some of the non-bearing stud walls on the first floor. We’re moving things around a bit, and the first wall to come down was between the kitchen and the foyer. In order to get it down completely, I had one obstacle to deal with: a water pipe leading to our 2nd floor bathroom.

The upstairs bath apparently had only cold water when it was first built. The cold water pipe (the one in the wall I wanted to take down) is likely original to the house, and the hot water pipe runs up a different wall and was obviously added later.

In any event, I decided to begin unscrewing pipe in the bathroom, and to dismantle it entirely until I got to the basement. Of course I turned off the water to the house first.

I quickly gave up on this process. I was able to unscrew a couple of pipes, but quickly ran into several that were more or less permanently frozen. Looking at the insides of the pipes revealed heavy corrosion that had bonded the fittings together. I tried WD40 to no avail. So I grabbed my trusty Milwaukee Sawzall and went to work. I got the cold water pipe out in about 15 minutes.

Now I faced a dilemma. With no cold water to the bathroom (at least for several weeks until we’re ready to run new PEX tubing upstairs…) there was no way to operate the toilet. My plan was to temporarily hook the toilet to the hot water supply. Not very energy efficient, but I figured it should work just fine.

So I began unscrewing some of the hot water pipes so I could splice in the toilet. But these pipes had the same corrosion problem as the cold pipes, and pretty quickly I broke one of the fittings by torquing on it a bit too hard with the pipe wrench. Doh! Fortunately, I was able to remove this ‘T’ fitting from the supply pipe and get the job done. If I’d broken it completely, the job would have gotten a lot bigger as I’d have needed to follow the supply pipe down to the basement and try to splice on down there. Yikes!

All said and done, the bathroom is temporarily plumbed with hot water only, and my foyer wall is completely dismantled. This coming weekend we’ll probably remove some more superfluous plumbing, and maybe even replace the old stack with a new one: for the new half bath we need to add fittings to the stack and it may just be easier to replace the existing one with plastic. I’m not a huge fan of plastic over cast iron, but I’m not seeing many choices given the condition of current stack… More to come.