Water to the carriage house!

So! As I said yesterday, I found the pipe to the carriage house hiding under the kitchen floor. Today I relaid the entire pipe from the kitchen cutoff over to that pipe, and like magic, I had water in the carriage house -- well, for a couple of minutes, before the pressure blew one single fitting under the bathroom sink, with a very impressive jet of water into the garage area below. That's fixed now, but not yet tested. The pipe glue says to wait two hours before applying pressure, and I've been careful to do so.

Anyway, so the main part of the day's work was under this little riser in the kitchen:

Unsurprisingly, that riser turns out to be there because the floor under it was pretty much demolished in order to fix frozen plumbing. Why, you ask, did the plumbing freeze so often under the kitchen floor? Simply because the crawlspace there had openings to the outside for ventilation -- so the pipes were outside. The response of the previous owner, of course, was to stuff lots of fiberglass in and put an electric space heater under the floor. Actually closing the holes in the foundation would probably have been more effective. And safer.

At any rate, he didn't do that. Instead, he repaired a lot of plumbing there. I pulled most of it out of the rubble today, just to make space for the new pipe I laid. But the first step was to take out the floor. The carpet in that picture, of course, had already been pulled back -- it would have been in the dumpster, but the present sink and cabinets are on top of it, so it has waited so far (but not much longer). At any rate, here's our worksite:

And here's a shot from down in the basement:

As you can see, it's really just a couple of feet through the basement wall to the kitchen crawlspace. (If only it were a crawlspace, but instead there's no room to crawl through it at all.) So it was an easy matter to cut three lengths of pipe, attach a connector to the black pipe, glue it to the cutoff, and there was much rejoicing! Until the fitting in the carriage house blew, anyway.

Here's a picture of the shiny new pipe. The shot turned out a bit blurry.

The pipe I just laid is the one going along the edge of the hole and under the drainpipe there. The other one is the one I just bypassed; I'll remove it later. The bowl at lower right was a serendipitous find; it had obviously fallen under the floor somehow. Poltergeists, maybe.

Here's a shot of some of the plumbing debris I pulled out from under the floor, along with the bowl:

So tomorrow, I'll hook up the water heater in the carriage house, and have the gas turned on so I'll have hot water. Then my new ISP should eventually hook up my broadband, and when ABF gets my stuff here, at the end of the week, the dog and I can move into the carriage house! Woo!