The First Small Step...

When purchasing the house one of the small fears was that I knew there was a broken water line inside of the ceiling in the kitchen, but there was no way to truly tell where or how bad it was without openning things up (which HUD doesn't allow you to do).  This led to buying the house in as is and just trusting that I would be able to handle whatever lay hidden behind the sheetrock. 

So as first order of business on Saturday my dad came over and we decided to cut a hole in the ceiling in the spot of the largest water stain.  In order to truly look around I had to cut a "me" size hole and peak around.  So after removing a decent size piece of ceiling I stuck my head up in the ceiling only to see...nothing. There weren't any pipes anywhere near where the stain was and there were floor joists and vent pipe all throughout theat kept me from seeing anything else.  So after crawling up behind the hot water heater in the garage and looking into what I could see of the floor from that area I saw that the pipes only went into the house a few feet before breaking off and turning across the house.  Armed with this new informaiton I cut a second hole in the hallway area next to the kitchen counter.  As I got up into the ceiling directly in front of my face was a broken copper water line with about a 1 inch gash.  So after cutting this pipe section out and soldering in a new joint we turned the water back on to the house thinking that we had fixed the only busted pipe....

Sadly that was not the case and water was shooting back out in front of me again.  So we turned the water back off and found a second cracked pipe on one of the 90 degree pipes.  After replacing that piece we again think that we are done...well you can guess what happened next, MORE WATER!  So in order to find this leak we had to cut another hole in the laundry room to look at where this pipe was feeding up into the bathroom above and then go up into the bathroom and cut a hole out behind the sink...not those pipes, and so over to the bathtub where luckily an access area was found by pulling apart the shelves.  Low and behold there is another busted pipe leading up to the tub.  So we fix that pipe and turn all the water back on in the house and...drum roll....nothing leaked! 

So I have to admit at this point I was pretty excited and we were turning on everything in the house to get the water flowing through.  Seemed like a great idea.  Then while I'm in the kitchen suddenly water starts pouring through the kitchen ceiling so I poke my head up through the already cut holes and sure enough water is pouring down out of the mater bathroom.  To figure out if this is from the shower drain or the shower head dad turns on the shower while holding a bucket under it while I watch from below.  Well right when he turns on the shower water starts pouring down so I'm yelling for him to turn off the water.  He couldn't hear me so I decided to do something smart and pound my fist into the ceiling above my head thinking he would hear that and turn off the water...one slight problem, directly above my head where I decided to puch my fist was a nail sticking through the floor.  So you guessed it, nail went straight in and rammed against my bone...(this only took two days of self-doctoring to get rid of the infection. :) )  Well anyways, we ended up openning up the back of the shower and installing a "shark-bite" extention pipe in place of broken copper pipe since it would have been hard to solder the pipe without catching something on fire.  Though expensive these quick fixes are AMAZING!  So 6 hours, 6 Holes, and 4 trips to Home Depot later...it's all done!  Leave it to say HGTV would have loved me for a show...maybe a renovation disasters show...but still a show. :) 

So one last thing to note in this whole fiasco was that while looking for the broken pipe it was very noticable that all the heating duct tubing throughout the floor (leading to the upstairs vents) was torn to shreds and strewn all about.  There was also a large amount of "fecal matter" everywhere.  So it appears that I need to catch at least 1 if not multiple Raccoons before I can seal the ceiling back up. :)  See pictures below for some updated images. 

Dad looking at the stain in the ceiling...

Dad looking in the hole not beliving me that you couldn't see any pipes. :)

 

                       So I cut a second hole...                    Just a little ways from the first hole....

               Here is the start of what I found....      And here is all 4 of the issues...

So after that adventure was complete I spent the next two days scraping all the popcorn off all the rooms in the first floor so that I can redo all the ceilings.  Drawn in the french doors I'm going to add between the office and living room as well.  So all in all I'm off to a start. :)  It's just nice to have all the utilities working in the place!  But first I have a large pet (or multiples) that must be caught and taken care of. :)