Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

When I spotted a new leak in the ceiling of the kitchen pantry yesterday, I was pissed. Pissed, because it was just two days after we'd finished getting another leak repaired. A repair that we'd waited 8 weeks to get started. And this new leak was occurring just 2 feet over from the previous one! Had the repairmen screwed up the repair that badly?

I did a bit of troubleshooting on the problem myself. It didn't seem like it was the same leak as before just 2 feet over. It seemed like it might actually be a problem with the washing machine... which, yes, is about 2 feet over from where the toilet upstairs is! But could it really be such a coincidence that our washer sprung a leak right after the toilet was fixed? And right after plumbers were working on the water main outside all day? I was too pissed to want to run a full troubleshooting process myself. Thankfully the owner of the plumbing company agreed to come over.

The plumber and I worked through the troubleshooting process together. He saw my reason for suspecting the washing machine— dampness on the floor underneath it— and helped me shift it around a bit to pinpoint the problem more precisely. It wasn't a loose hookup problem or a leak in a supply hose or drain hose. It was some kind of leak from the body of the washing machine itself.

So, good news/bad news: It's not a plumbing leak. It won't be another $13,000 job that takes 8 weeks to schedule. But it looks like now we need to buy a new washer.

A week ago I posted 🎵 Back In The Shower Again 🎵. That was about DIY work Hawk and I did to fix up the shower in our master bathroom. The impetus for us doing that, work we'd put off for years, was the fact hat our second bathroom was soon to be out of commission to repair a leaky toilet drain flange. Well, after almost a week out of commission, it was finished off yesterday afternoon.



What's fixed? Well, the most visible change is the new tile floor. The floor wasn't the problem, though. It was collateral damage. The plumbing project coordinator decided that in order to fix the leak in the toilet drain they have to rip up a significant part of the floor. So they specced the work at replacing all the tile. The real fix, the thing that was actually broken, is the flange on the drain pipe under the toilet.

I christened the toilet yesterday afternoon. ...Well, it wasn't really the toilet I christened. The toilet is the same unit that's been there for, I think, 30+ years. Certainly we haven't replaced it, and we've owned the house since the early 00s. It's just the drain pipe I christened, when I flushed. 🤣

This morning I used the shower in this bathroom. No, there's nothing updated about it. It's got the same tile and same fixtures that were there when we bought the place 20+ years ago. I used it because our newly-updated shower is temporarily set up for Hawk's needs with her foot in a cast, and also because the newly-updated shower has a low-flow shower head. I didn't know replacing that shower head was going to result in the new one being like a toy. It was satisfying to shower under the older, higher pressure spray of our 30+ year old shower.

I've posted a few times recently about plumbing repairs in our house. We've had two plumbing projects recently. One was replacing some hardware in our shower in our first bathroom. That was a DIY project to replace some dripping valves and update the look of some hardware, and it's now done.

The other project is replacing the toilet flange in our second bathroom. That's necessary because of a leak in the ceiling we discovered. We called a plumber since it was a leak inside the walls. He removed the toilet, cut into the walls, and diagnosed it as a broken drain flange that would need to be replaced. That was all eight weeks ago now. Yes, it took that long for them to schedule the work to fix it.

Finally, Tuesday, a small crew came to start the work. Here's the Day 1 progress.



Part of the reason it took the plumbing company 8 weeks to schedule the work is that they realized they'd need to remove the tile floor in the bathroom and re-tile it. You can see the floor stripped down to the sub-floor in the photo above. You can also see the new piece of sub-floor (plywood) they installed. That's to replace what was rotted out by the leaking flange. Once they stripped out all the tiles they realized the rot spread more widely than first thought. Thus it was good the project lead decided to strip the whole floor.

The black pipe with the metal can sitting atop it is a temporary drain pipe sitting atop the new flange. That will be trimmed down to size when they're ready to reinstall the toilet.



I posted yesterday about moving my home office downstairs temporarily. Here's why. The photo above shows what's currently in my regular home office. Yeah, the bathroom being repaired is connected to the office. So in addition to it being super noisy up there while the workers are working, the office is currently storing a few things that aren't in the bathroom. Like the actual toilet!

The plan for today, Day 2, is that the workers will install new tile on the bathroom floor. Among other things that means they're going to be running a tile saw— which has a very loud, very high pitched whine as it runs. Working from downstairs may not be enough. I might have to work somewhere other than in the house today.

After literal years of us leaving it unused I feel like there should be a powerful rock riff to herald the reopening of the shower in our main bathroom. Maybe something from Aerosmith?

🎵 I'm baaaack
I'm back in the shower again
I'm baaaack
I'm back in the shower again 🎵

So, what's the deal with the shower? Well, first here's a picture of what it looks like now, and then a (not-so) brief history of how we got to this point:

1. We renovated this shower and had the new tiles and handheld plumbing put in 15 years ago. The contractor didn't do a great job on the grout work, though. The grout chipped and cracked in a few places after several years. Also, mold developed until one of the lines of caulk.

2. We decided 6-7 years ago that we should stop using the shower until we could fix the grout and caulk. We considered hiring a pro again to fix it but also figured it was a DIY-able job if we did some research. Unfortunately...

3. We put off making time to do the research / do the work for several years. During this time we simply used the other shower in our house.

4. Hawk finally got sick of staring at it and followed up on watching some of the how-to videos I bookmarked last year. She bought the materials to patch the grout and redo the caulk. She did this late last month.

5. We started using the shower again. Hooray! But we quickly discovered a new problem. The shower head leaked a lot when we used it.

6. No problem fixing a leaky shower head. We just bought a new one! Well, I would have preferred to fix the old shower head by replacing a washer in it, a fix that would have cost pennies instead of $60, but that wasn't possible. The shower head was a sealed unit, preventing DIY repair. Ah, the disposable economy! We screwed on the new shower head and cord (seen in the photo above/right) and... discovered another problem.

7. The shower head leaked even when the water was turned off. I noticed this when I heard the drip... drip... drip... all night long. Alas the problem here was not the shower head but the valve in the plumbing. The valve mixer/cartridge pieces would need to be replaced.

8. I did first try disassembling, cleaning, and re-lubricating the parts in the valve, in case (like with the shower head) the problem was just a washer that had dried out too much during the years it was left unused. I cleaned it out as best I could, but the leak persisted. So we ordered replacement parts, about an $80 cost including tax, and waited several days for them to be shipped.

9. While we were waiting for the plumbing parts to arrive Hawk decided it was time to replace the mounting rod for the shower, too. That's the vertical bar and the swivel mount the hand-held piece slots in (in the photo above). Those pieces arrived. We removed the old rod, plugged two of the bolt holes in the tile (the new rod uses 2 mounting holes while the old one used 4), and mounted up the new rod.

10. Finally, last Thursday, we replaced the components inside the valve. Online videos helped enormously with this, giving us the confidence to DIY it without concern that we'd break something. We bolted it all back up, did a pressure test, adjusted the temperature limiter, et voila! We're baaaack in the shower again!

This was a stay-home weekend for me. It's not too surprising that after, like, seven trips in the past 8 weeks I needed a weekend just spent at home. And especially with last week— or the last 3/5 of it— being so busy preparing a customer workshop Wed-Thu, followed by delivering it on Friday, after getting a last-minute system failure fixed before 6am,  I was toast. I couldn't focus on anything else. I had no gas left in my tank to work on anything serious, such as preparing for session two of the workshop. It was all I could manage to finish my weekly reporting at the end of the day Friday.

This weekend wasn't all sitting around, vegging, though I'm not sure how much I'd have minded if it were. Instead, Hawk and I got busy fiddling around with one of our showers.

We'd left this shower unused for several years because small sections of grout and caulk were in poor shape. Well, two weeks ago Hawk buckled down (while I was out of town on one of my business trips) and patched the grout and redid the caulk. Great news, the shower's ready to use again, right? Except as we did start using it for a week we discovered that the shower head leaks.

The shower head is old...ish and was left unused for years, so probably a washer in it dried out. Yet it's new enough that it's designed in the "No user-serviceable parts inside" school of force-you-to-buy-another-one product design. So we couldn't just unscrew the face plate and replace the washer for $.30. No, we had to buy a whole damn new shower head. For the type we wanted, a roughly similar replacement, it was $55. Fifty-five dollars because we couldn't open the old one to replace a 30-cent washer.

Oh, but it gets better. And by "better" I mean worse. You know how everybody maligns low-flow toilets? Well apparently all shower heads are low-flow, too now. And our old one wasn't even that old. We installed it back in, I think 2008. Or maybe 2010. Anyway, it's not like it's from the 1960s or something. Or even the 1990s. But the new ones are all lower flow.

While replacing the shower head we discovered another problem. The shower valve leaks. The leak comes in the form of the shower head dripping water even when the valve is turned off. Probably another 30-cent washer problem, I grumbled to myself. But this one might cost hundreds to fix.

We took a crack at the shower valve on Sunday to see what we're working with. Unlike the shower head which can't be opened and fixed, the valve consists of several components that can be disassembled, cleaned or replaced, and put back together. We checked stores and found the "replaced" option would cost anywhere from $30 to $120 (plus the value of our time), so I tried the "cleaned" option first and put everything back together. No dice. It still drips.

So, we have new parts on order. It looks like next weekend will be another stay-around-home weekend. Stay around home and fix the shower, that is.

Tuesday evening I noticed something suspicious high up in our kitchen pantry. There was a bulge in the paint where the ceiling meets the wall. The bulge was about 6 inches diameter.



When paint bulges like this it means generally one thing: there's a leak. Indeed, when I poked the bulge gently with my fingers I could tell that the drywall behind the bulge had already rotted away.

This spot is right below one of our toilets. We figured the problem is a leak in the outflow pipe. We shut off the water to that toilet (just in case) and put tape over the toilet to remind ourselves not to use it. Then we called the HOA[*] to get a plumber out and waited.

[*] We called the HOA management company because we live in a townhouse. It's a multifamily building with shared walls and shared property. There are rules that govern whether a particular problem is HOA responsibility or homeowner responsibility. Hawk is president of the HOA board so she's pretty familiar with these policies. A pipe leak inside the wall would most likely be an HOA responsibility to fix, but not 100% certain (depends on the source of the leak), so we'll start with the HOA.

The property management company called back on Wednesday morning (we deemed this not an emergency) to get details. Then they contacted a plumbing company that's done other work in our townhouse community recently. No, not the "Supergirl" plumbers. As amusing as that autocorrect was, and as much fun as I had with AI image generation, that company didn't do a great job. They were rock solid for years but slipped recently as ownership changed hands.

The plumbers made an appointment with us for "Sometime between 10am to 4pm Thursday". Yes, that was the most specific they could be, like it's still the 1970s when people are home all day. Fortunately we are home all day. But I'm home because I work from home. With a packed schedule on Thursday I was concerned what kind of interruption I'd face when a plumber started cutting away drywall, removing a toilet, wrenching on pipes, etc. Stay tuned!