Plumb the Depths…
By Nathan
One of the most important features of a new bathroom is something that is mostly invisible. And if it’s working correctly, you hardly notice it at all. It’s the drainage system. A homeowner only really pays attention to bathroom drains when they aren’t working the way they should.
This reality becomes especially important when preparing to place four inches of fiberglass-reinforced concrete over the top of your drains. You do NOT want to have to repair a drain line once that concrete turns into solid rock.
Do I know what I’m doing, you might reasonably ask. Are you kidding? How could I possibly know how to do something that I’ve never done? That’s why I’ve got this guy.
This is Ross Ott. He’s one of my Dearing neighbors, a member of Alleluia, and one of my longest-lasting friends in Georgia. He put this picture on a T-shirt and gave it to all of his friends in Dearing for Christmas one year. I don’t know if I really have to say anything more about him.
Except, of course, that he’s qualified to help me put the drain lines into the slab correctly. Mostly. He’s done a lot of plumbing but never laid out drain lines. So before he did anything, he wanted to consult with a plumber who had experience. I started to call around.
Drains with an accent.
While I was trying to find a master plumber to help us not make a mess of my drains, I had a little free time. Not really. I’m building a house with my own two hands. With a baby on the way.
So it was time to start the French drains. My history with French drains is pretty dramatic. A couple of years ago, right before Christmas, I put my foot through my living room floor. I discovered that one of the foundation vents allowed water to flow under my house when it rained. Lots of water. A veritable river. The water just sat there and rotted out my floor.
That Christmas vacation consisted in ripping out the entire living room floor and subfloor, putting in French chains, digging out the crawlspace, and rebuilding the floor. Ho, ho, thud. Most exhausting vacation ever.
This time I’ll take no chances. I sent my wife to Southern Pipe & Supply in Thomson to pick up a 100′ spool of the black corrugated drain pipe for French drains. Then I called the company that brought the sand for the foundation and ordered gravel. I split a truckload with my neighbors Michael and Holly.
These French drains were way easier than the ones I made on that hard-working Christmas. No digging! I put some filter fabric on the outside edge of the footer, put down that black plastic pipe, covered it with gravel then more filter fabric, and put dirt on top. I also got to use my friend Barbara’s tractor. It’s a big Kubota and pretty much a beast. Moving gravel with a tractor is much easier than with a shovel and wheelbarrow.
It’s electrifying!
In the meantime, I also called Joe Almeter, my electrician. It was time to disconnect the old power and hook up the temporary pole. As usual, he was Johnny on the spot. He came the next day and put the conduit (which is just a plastic pipe) into the foundation. A few days earlier, he had buried conduit from the temporary pole to the crawlspace door under my house. This temporary conduit would protect the cable that will provide electricity to my home while I’m building the addition. Electricity is one of those things I consider “non-optional.”
He called the engineering department at Jefferson Energy Coop to let them know that he was ready for them to transfer the connection to the temporary pole. Boy, was he surprised when they called him back to tell him that they’d be there the very next day. He has been an electrician for at least 30 years and he said that he’s never gotten next-day service. I think God is watching over this project to make sure it gets done on time.
Sure enough, the next day the crew from JEC showed up and switched the service to the temporary pole. After they finished, Joe got to work running the cable from the pole to the electrical panel in my kitchen. This turned out to be a bit more challenging than he expected. The cable is about as thick as my son’s wrist and had to go through a conduit with a 45-degree bend in it. He got some help from my father-in-law, Jerry, as well as a couple of our neighbors’ eldest sons.
The cable didn’t want to go through. Joe greased the first part of it, but it still got stuck at the bend. They were using a fish tape, which is a thin piece of strong wire that they attached to the cable, but the cable just wouldn’t budge. Joe had the idea of attaching the fish tape to Barbara’s tractor bucket so he could use some horsepower to pull it the rest of the way through. No good. The fish tape snapped, another first for Joe.
Finally, he decided to cut the conduit at the joint, pull the cable through, and then reglue the conduit. This did the trick. Once that was done, he just cut open my kitchen wall and switched the old cable for the new one in my main panel.
Bring in the experts.
About this time, I got in touch with Frank Densmore. He’s another member of Alleluia and taught my wife English in high school. He also happens to be an accomplished plumber. He agreed to come out and give us the pointers that we needed to put the drains in right the first time.
While looking at our project, he told us about the time that he had to fix some plumbing under a concrete slab. Instead of breaking up the slab with a jackhammer, he hired a couple of high school boys to dig a tunnel underneath the slab. They worked happily for hours digging out the tunnel because he was paying them over $100 for their efforts. Once they were done, it only took him 45 minutes to complete his part of the project. He got paid more than a grand. He explained to the boys that age and wisdom command a higher price than youthful vigor. It was a lesson they never forgot.
For my slab, the process was pretty simple. We used grade stakes and string to mark out the future walls. This gave us the frame of reference for marking the out where the drains for two sinks, two toilets, and two showers would go. Then we took a trip to Southern Pipe to get parts. I mentioned our project to the guy behind the counter and he remembered my wife coming in for the drain pipes. He said that the whole time he talked to her, he heard some commotion underneath the counter, but couldn’t see anything. After she left, he discovered that Jonathan, my two-year-old, had completely rearranged the glue while they’d been talking.
Dig in.
We got back to the house and started to dig trenches for the drain. Ross used a hammer and chisel to break a hole through the concrete block. As we started laying out the pipe, we quickly realized that we didn’t have all the parts that we needed to do the job. It’s a rule of thumb that plumbing jobs require at least three trips to the store. That’s why plumbers have big trucks filled will all kinds of random and assorted parts. It’s also the reason that you lay out the entire drain system before you glue anything. It’s much easier to plan the system when you can look at it up close.
By that point, it was pretty late in the day, so I got a new list of parts to pick up at the store the next day. It took a few days before we could get together again, but by the weekend we had what we needed to finish the drains. We got back to work laying down the drains. In the pictures below, you might notice the black boxes around two of the pipes. Those boxes leave enough room in the concrete slab for the plumbing that will go under the showers.
After gluing the pipes together, I had a few more jobs to do. Using a level, I checked every pipe to make sure that it had a good slope down and out. Sand needed to be compacted under the pipe so that it wouldn’t settle and lose the slope when I put sand on top of it. This took a lot of tiny adjustments but eventually, all of the pipes sloped down and out through the block wall.
Then I had to bury all of my hard work. Slowly but surely, I covered the evidence of my newly acquired plumbing expertise. This took some time because I also had to tamp it down. I made a little tamper out of a piece of 2×4 and a piece of 2×6 and started smashing the sand down. Larry recommended that I wet the sand a little bit to make it compact better. It helped a lot. Tamping by hand helped me to appreciate the awesomeness of the gas-powered plate tamper that I’d used to compress the rest of the sand. Tamping this little bit of sand took almost an hour and had my heart pounding. After capping the pipes, I was done.
Hopefully, I’ll never have any problems with the electrical or plumbing that is buried under the concrete slab. If we did it right, everything should work perfectly for as long as I live here. If not, I’ll be digging a tunnel, like Frank’s teenage helpers. Something I’d like to avoid if at all possible.
If you want to read more of my adventures building the House of Krupa, check out the archive!
Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.
