House-Dreams by Hugh Howard

Author:Hugh Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2001-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE COMMON HOURS

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,

and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will

meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

—Henry David Thoreau

Filing your taxes, taking your last exam, or completing a job of almost any kind is accompanied by a sense of liberation. The moment the manuscript I had been working on was completed and entrusted to the United States Postal Service, I felt like kicking up my heels. Instead, I buckled on my tool belt. The month was March, but with the manuscript on its way to the publisher, I was finally able to go back to work on the house in earnest.

The first job to do was the plumbing.

Different people are daunted by different aspects of construction. Often the electrical work seems the scariest. The fear may be of fire, electric shock, or even electrocution, but whichever the case, many novice homeowners are terrified of working with wiring. For me, plumbing was intimidating.

When we bought our cottage, more than a dozen years earlier, I hadn’t the knowledge to identify serious problems in examining the structure and working systems. If I had, Betsy and I would have been shocked to find that essentially everything needed radical reworking. Our ignorance meant that we discovered the problems one at a time. After taking possession of the house, the plumbing was among the first.

The well went dry our third weekend living there. Within a few months, we realized that the kitchen was in the wrong place to suit our needs, lining the side of the living room as if the house were a tiny studio apartment. We wanted a larger kitchen, one discrete from the living room. The bathroom was actually in two places, with the tub in a virtual closet and the lavatory and sink two rooms away. At first we thought we could adapt, but the awkwardness of the arrangement just wouldn’t go away, even though relocating the kitchen and bath meant replumbing the whole house.

The process began with a close inspection of what was there, flexible plastic pipe of the cheapest sort with hose clamps at the joints. None of the system was worth salvaging, but the overall scheme of things became evident in dismantling the pieces. The basic principles were that the supply pipes brought clean water to the fixtures, while the waste pipes took the dirty water away. The supply lines were small (less than an inch in diameter), the waste lines larger (about four inches). The water coming in was pressurized, which is why the water flowed when a tap was opened. The water and solid waste leaving the system was not pressurized but relied upon gravity to drain.

In a properly plumbed house, each fixture also has its own trap. This U-shaped space is built into every toilet or incorporated into pipes adjacent to the tub or sinks. The traps remain filled with water at all times, blocking sewer gases from entering the living spaces of the house.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.