Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe

Today Noel removed some of the old infrastructure, to get it out of the way for the new plumbing and electrical service.

There were these old pipes from around the sink, installed like a monkey did the work.

And of course, the ancient, leaky lead drain pipe from the former upstairs toilet.

The extra class with that lead pipe is the patch of cloth tape around the upper part. That works SO well for repairing plumbing. That poop runs through.

Between the Multimaster and the Sawzall, Noel got the random weird plumbing out pretty easily.

He even pulled the long PVC drain that went down inside the wall out, cutting it into pieces.

Next up here is pulling up those floorboards and fixing all the damage they did to the floor joists.

That's the lead pipe at the top of the image. It ran down inside the closet off the back parlour.

It was held to the wall every so often with a lead clip screwed into the framing. Fair enough: that's pretty similar to how we do copper plumbing today.

The great height of the thing meant the only reasonable way of taking it out was to cut it into chunks. Not that we had great plans to reuse an old lead pipe or anything.

And here's one of those lead clips. The screwheads were too shallow and rusty to remove it the easy way, so Noel cut it off.

Lead is soft and easy to cut, but not so easy that it was a total cake walk. Also, it makes up for softness by weighing a ton and folding really easily.

It was a big lead pipe, let me tell you.

And there's the pile of debris, waiting to take its final trip.

posted by ayse on 12/01/12