Plumbing Upgrade Frequently Asked Questions

Introduction

Home improvement is a vast, scary subject. This post focuses on a single aspect: plumbing … not that such a finite project isn’t hugely complicated. If you are contemplating upgrading your plumbing, or if you just like to laugh at another person’s expense, read on.

Why would I replace my plumbing?

Depending on the age of your home, there could be many reasons to upgrade your plumbing. For one thing, if your pipes are so old they’re made of lead, you are being poisoned and your pipes should be replaced immediately. (Not that I’d expect you to take my advice, because you’re probably already crazier than the Mad Hatter.) If you have that janky plastic plumbing they were doing in the ‘80s, you’re probably tired of it leaking and/or giving you cancer. And if you have galvanized steel pipes, you must be getting sick of how little flow there is due to the plumbing equivalent of arteriosclerosis, and of all the bits of metal that are sloughing off, getting carried along the flow, and clogging up your faucets until they only drool.

What would be the single hardest thing about upgrading my plumbing?

If you live in the Bay Area, there’s a great chance your home has just one bathroom, in which case it’s pretty obvious what the hardest part is: not having a bathroom for some time, possibly weeks. If you’re literally anal retentive, or one of those granola types who’s convinced bathing is bad for your skin, maybe this isn’t too big a deal. For the rest of us, it’s logistically very tough.

What? You have more than one bathroom? Clearly you broke the first three rules of buying real estate: location, location, and location. Why would you buy a home somewhere with such cheap land that your home is big enough to support a second bathroom? Don’t you care about your family?

Should I hire a general contractor?

There are many good reasons to hire a general contractor. First, this person probably knows all the potential gotchas of the project and can plan accordingly. Meanwhile, he or she can easily bring in all the various tradesmen who will be required, and keep everything running smoothly and within budget. All you have to do is make some basic choices, and of course pay the bill.

On the other hand, it’s almost impossible to find a contractor these days who will give you the time of day. Waiting around for them could stall out your project before it’s even begun. And, you could always get a bad one, who cashes your deposit and then skips town. There’s also the matter of their cost, which can be quite high. (This is especially important to consider if you’re a cheap bastard.) Finally, if you do the work without a contractor, you’ll encounter myriad problems and will learn so much. (This is particularly valuable if you’re a blogger.)

I’ve decided to go it alone, sans contractor. What gotchas should I look out for?

Well, you’re going to need more than a good plumber. Lots of a house’s plumbing is behind the walls, so the plumbers will need to cut into them, thus you’ll have to suddenly scramble and line up a drywall crew, and then painters. You’ll probably need to rip out a bunch of bathroom tile as well, which—more than likely—will expose dry rot, meaning you’ll need to get a carpenter in there pronto to replace a bunch of timbers. All these crews will need to be coordinated, and arranging their schedules efficiently may well drag out your project. And last but not least, it’s practically a given that during this convoluted project you’ll discover that your home is built on an Indian burial ground, so you’ll need to arrange some kind of dance to drive out the ghosts—and you’ll also need to ensure that your plumbers, drywallers, painters, carpenters, and tilers are blessed by the Tribal Council. And nobody is more backlogged than those guys.

How should I select my plumber, tiler, etc.? Are references important?

In a perfect world—well, in a perfect world your pipes would have been made of copper to begin with and the whole project would be unnecessary. But in a merely reasonable, fair world you’d be able to follow a logical process in selecting your tradesmen, such as reading reviews, comparing bids, checking references, etc. But in the real world, these people are in such high demand you’ll end up going with the one outfit that actually returned your call. So the question you have to ask yourself as you embark on this home repair journey is: do I feel lucky today? Well do ya, punk?

When the crew of plumbers arrived and checked out the existing plumbing in my beloved home, they actually started laughing. Is this acceptable?

Yeah, I know that must feel pretty insulting, but can you acknowledge that at least they have a point? If you live in an old home like mine (built in 1929), most of the construction is good but maybe the builders just didn’t know any better than to run your pipes outside the walls of the house. And if you live in something built after 1950, well, those builders didn’t have a soul and were just trying to cut costs wherever possible, which is why the plumbing material isn’t even sturdy enough to build a good child’s toy. The good news is, the mockery from the plumbing crew validates your decision to spend a godawful amount of money on this long-overdue upgrade.

I completely failed to anticipate that I’d need drywallers, and suddenly had all these huge sections of missing walls and ceiling in my house. I scrambled to get recommendations from friends and neighbors for a good crew, but all these companies were booked solid through 2026. The plumber said, in so many words, “Don’t worry, I know a guy” and brought in a crew of people I’d never even met, much less vetted, who gave me a verbal quote seemingly pulled out of thin air. I’m almost certain I’m being ripped off. Should I panic? Try to talk them down on price? Put the project on hold? Or what?

Go with that crew, and just pay them whatever they ask for. Try to get them to write something down, just so the price doesn’t go up every time you turn around. If you’re feeling upset about this, don’t. Instead, look at the big picture: if you can afford to own a home, and have this work done, and pay the crew, then life has been pretty kind to you overall. Or you could consider this a luxury tax, or some kind of divine punishment for not planning ahead. And besides, it’s entirely possible the crew has quoted you a fair price and you’ll get a great return on investment.

You used the term “tradesman” a bit ago. Isn’t that completely sexist? How do you live with yourself?

I thought about saying “tradespeople,” but that just sounds ridiculous, and besides, my spell-checker flagged it as wrong. And then I started thinking about how female movie stars often prefer to be called actors rather than actresses. It seems like a case could be made to consider “tradesman” a gender-neutral term. After all, my daughters (they of the woke generation) consider “guys” gender-neutral, and even call each other “dude.”

My home indeed has just one bathroom. How will I relieve myself? How will I bathe?

Well, you could always rent a Port-A-John, aka San-O-Let, aka Honey Bucket, for the duration of the project. I even suggested this to my wife, but she didn’t seem interested. So I figured if she can do without, why can’t I (especially since I get to pee standing up)?

Thankfully, we’re lucky enough to live just a few minutes (on foot) from a public park with a decent restroom. (See? Location, location, location!) We also found a cat-sitting gig at a neighbor’s house that included showering privileges. Obviously our project has lasted far longer than anybody could be on vacation, so before and after that magical interlude, I was just doing whore’s baths.

Is there a less vulgar term for whore’s bath?

I guess you could call it a sponge bath, but let’s be real here: you are about to be in the middle of a very tumultuous, endlessly metastasizing, and grotesquely expensive project. You’ll be using a lot worse language than that.

I am working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Can I still do a project of this size, or do I really need to wait until I’m back in the office?

Just bite the bullet and apologize to your colleagues, partners, and customers in advance. And during your videoconferences, try to say as little as possible. Even if your conferencing technology boasts noise cancelation, that will only go so far. I thought it was working great recently, because I could hear fine, but I was also rocking the sweet Bose noise-canceling headphones. It did not occur to me that those were only helping me. When I played back the recording later I was horrified at all the background noise that erupted every time I went off mute.

This complication could be a blessing in disguise, though: assuming you’re smart about muting as much as you possibly can, your colleagues and underlings will finally be able to get a word in edgewise. This is a great excuse to learn to delegate.

Honey Bucket? Seriously?

I kid you not. That’s actually one company’s name for these.

When I mentioned this project to a friend, he warned me about “scope creep.” What is that?

This term, borrowed from project management jargon, refers to the tendency of projects to expand, with new and expensive features getting added as you go, so the original estimate is out the window. Some of this is due to unforeseen factors like dry rot or a non-GFI electric outlet having been senselessly installed like an eighth of an inch from the floor and embedded in a tile. But it can also result from the realization that your toilet is so incredibly low you’re practically squatting above a hole in the floor, like the thing was designed for toddlers, so wouldn’t this be a great opportunity—with all these plumbers around—to buy a new, amazingly tall toilet that you can actually lower yourself onto with ease, rather than doing what’s essentially a controlled fall onto the toilet seat? But by the time you learned that this amazing toilet is like $600, and the crew only knocks off a few bucks on the basis of already being in your home and redoing all the plumbing to your old toilet anyway, your heart is set on the idea of a tall toilet and it’s too late to go back.

Scope creep is basically endless. Suddenly the tile around the tub & shower area needs to extend across another wall (which is called wainscoting) and then up past the sink (a backsplash). And since they’re removing the mirror, suddenly that needs to become a second medicine cabinet. And you didn’t expect the “trim” (i.e., tub & sink fixtures) to cost $1200. And then you remembered that the tub stopper mechanism doesn’t work, which is amazingly expensive to fix (as in, four figures, unless my wife was joking, but I just can’t tell anymore), and should have been done before the cut-out in the ceiling below the bathroom was drywalled up. So, there’s probably no point in trying to budget for a project like this. Just expect to blow through all available funds before you’re done. Or, you could put your foot down and declare discretionary scope creep (i.e., that not caused by dry rot, illegal electrical, or Indian burial grounds) strictly off-limits.

What is dry rot, exactly?

Dry Rot is a 1956 British comedy film directed by Maurice Elvey, starring Ronald Shiner, Brian Rix, Peggy Mount, and Sid James, concerning three dodgy bookies trying to rig a horse race.

That can’t be right. Earlier you described it as a house problem requiring a carpenter.

Oh, right, that dry rot. It’s when wood rots due to (I guess) getting wet when it’s supposed to be dry.

So shouldn’t it be called wet rot?

I’ve just learned that true dry rot involves fungi and mycelium and spores and whatnot. So it might be possible that it doesn’t require moisture … it’s all pretty complicated. Suffice to say, dry rot, in the homeowner vernacular, is simply when something is rotten and needs to be fixed via large expenditures of cash.

Other than having hot and cold running water in your home—which would seem like a bare necessity, not anything to spend your life savings on—is there any significant benefit to going through all of this?

Why, yes, at least from my perspective. Before this project began I was feeling pretty ambivalent about a lot of things. Somewhere along the line it felt like everything was just too much, and part of me was feeling pretty good about the inevitable extinction of the human race. But now, with this project possibly concluding in the somewhat near future, I suddenly care so much more about everything. I can’t stand the idea of all this amazing copper piping, and fresh paint, and beautiful tile and wainscoting and fixtures, being burned up in the next fire or consumed in a nuclear blast. That would just be such a waste, after I’ve suffered through—and funded—this ginormous project. So now I’m more passionate than ever that climate change has to be addressed, and Putin must be stopped. You might say I have a new lease on life.

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More Plumbing for Dummies

Introduction

This post recounts my third foray into amateur plumbing. Are we talking “heart of darkness” territory? No, more like brain of darkness. But don’t expect a thriller involving a geyser of raw sewage like last time; my 15-year-old daughter seemed bored by today’s tale. But if you think you’re more patient than she is (hint: if you’ve made it this far, you probably are), read on.

The rules

Amateur plumbing is not for the fainthearted. Fortunately I am the beneficiary of my father’s wisdom here, as he taught me some rules I should always keep in mind before diving in. Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Of course that’s not true. That’s a nice Norman Rockwell sentiment: good ol’ pop teaching his kid the ropes. The truth is, my dad never had time to sit me down and explain anything.

This isn’t to say he was ignorant about plumbing; he could be quite clever. For example, he built a contraption that would detect when his hot water heater had failed, and would automatically drain it somehow without flooding his house. (This makes almost as much sense as periodically replacing your hot water heater.) But that was many years before I was born so I didn’t get to work alongside him, handing up wrenches and drinking in his tutelage. By the time I came along, my dad’s strategy had shifted to dodging plumbing issues for as long as possible. Eventually, his home’s master bathroom actually lacked a toilet. To be precise, he had bought a new toilet, but for years and years never got around to installing it, and the unfinished project ultimately outlived him.

I do have a set of rules around such undertakings, which come from my own observation and some lessons imparted by a bike shop boss decades ago. They aren’t specific to plumbing, but cover any kind of tricky repair. Here they are:

• Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Professionals (such as plumbers) charge a lot for a reason.
• Don’t start a project when you’re tired and stressed out.
• Leave yourself plenty of time so you don’t end up with a half-finished project.
• Make sure you’re always working with plenty of light.
• Don’t start a tricky job on an empty stomach.
• Make sure you have resources lined up in case you get stuck.

I’m sure this list isn’t complete … feel free to add your own guidelines in the comments section below.

My plumbing predicament

From the standpoint of running water, my home is a minefield. The water pressure from the municipal utility district is plenty high—in fact, it’s too high, so my drip irrigation system is prone to sudden hose failures—but virtually all the pipes within the house are original, from 1929. They’re galvanized steel rather than copper, and they’re rusting inside. This means that little bits are forever flaking off and getting carried along with the water until they reach a faucet or shower head, which traps them. This causes clogs that severely hamper the flow. To solve the problem—i.e., replace all the rotting pipes—would be a major undertaking requiring many thousands of dollars. So I put up with it.

As a result, I’m on my third bathroom sink. I’ve tried to take apart the faucets and get rid of the crap clogging them up, but to no avail. Two different plumbers have insisted that there’s nothing to be done. “There’s a cartridge in there, and once it’s clogged, the whole fixture is shot,” they claim. Excuse me, but doesn’t “cartridge” imply something that can be easily replaced? Apparently not. So recently, my fairly new kitchen faucet, which I happen to really like, started to bog down. The flow has been weakening, gradually but steadily, for months. This has driven me crazy. I cannot continue to hemorrhage money on new faucets, but neither can I bear to plunk down many thousands of dollars to replace plumbing that more or less works. Meanwhile, I refuse to get another plumber in here to tell me there’s nothing to be done but replace a bunch more hardware and pay him a bunch more money.

So, with all the aforementioned rules in mind, I finally tackled the problem myself the other night. Here’s how that went, organized by my amateur plumbing rules.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew

To recap, professional plumbers have told me you can’t fix a clogged faucet. On that basis alone, my home repair attempt was arguably foolish from the get-go. The kitchen faucet is more complicated than the bathroom ones that the plumbers threw up their hands over. It’s got the hose you can pull out, and the button that switches between fill and spray. Moreover, the lines feeding it (which are built into it and non-removable) are remarkably inflexible and scrawny. There’s all kinds of room for problems here. I was well aware of all this when contemplating my repair and deciding whether to move forward.

Don’t start a project when you’re tired or stressed out

I’m tired and stressed out most of the time these days. I have two teenage daughters, a difficult job, and too many responsibilities. Moreover, when contemplating this repair I had just finished doing my taxes (which was particularly stressful due to the major changes in the tax code and their fiscally painful repercussions). What pretty much put me over the edge was that the flow from this faucet had gotten so low it was no longer possible to wash my hands. It was like the urine output from an old man with a significantly enlarged prostate. So I was beyond tired and stress out—I was livid.

Leave yourself plenty of time

It was late evening. I was supposed to be cooking dinner for my kids, as my wife was at her night class. I was also supposed to be packing for a multi-day family road trip. We’d be leaving early in the morning the next day. In no way would I have enough time to recover from difficulties associated with this repair. I almost cannot imagine a worse time to begin.

Make sure you have plenty of light

It’s actually almost impossible for me to have good light anymore, because as I age, my vision is failing. I’m so nearsighted, an object just a few feet away is too hard to see clearly without glasses, but with my glasses anything less than two feet away is blurry. I really need bifocals, but I’m just not psychologically ready to handle that, nor am I ready to start sliding my glasses down my nose and peering over them.

I do have a great work lamp I could plug in, but I get nervous using it around water sources, for two reasons: first, the electrical outlet under my sink doesn’t have GFI, and second, the lamp might heat up my work area to where I’d start sweating too much to grip my tools. At least, these are the reasons I came up with. The reality is, I was just too impatient and lazy to set up the light.

Don’t work on an empty stomach

I hadn’t had dinner, remember? I was too impatient to have a snack before getting started, so I was good and hangry. My blood sugar was surely very low, but of course my brain doesn’t work very well in this state so I was ignoring the inner voice that warned me I was being foolish.

Have appropriate resources lined up

I had no resources lined up. The hardware store would be closing soon, and I couldn’t reach my brother Bryan, the guy I usually turn to for advice. (Click here for the transcript of my last plumbing-related chat with him.) Perhaps the most important resource would have been my wife, as she would have certainly talked me out of this ill-conceived effort from the get-go. Ironically, this was one of the main reasons I did decide to go ahead with the repair: because I knew if I waited, she’d be around to talk sense into me. And I didn’t want to be sensible. I was incensed.

So how did all this pan out?

Well, first I disconnected the faucet from the main water supply to see how the flow was without it. Wow, it was great! So great it caused a minor flood in the cabinet under the sink! That was a hassle, but I was relieved I didn’t have a bigger problem. (The rusting pipes explanation was just a theory, after all.) So then I disconnected the part of the hose that goes through the faucet from the two narrow, stiff, plastic lines feeding it. I took the faucet/hose assembly out into the garage to see if forcing compressed air through it, via my soda bottle air compressor, would help.

My younger daughter helped with this part, manning the bike pump. This gave me both my hands free to try to hold the surgical tubing against the rest of the whole mess. A lot of air leaked out, but still a fair bit of water shot out everywhere, and though I was entirely dubious that any of this would make any difference, at least it felt good to be doing something. An added bonus was that the two-liter soda bottle didn’t explode, so neither my daughter nor I came away horribly disfigured or deafened. Later, with the benefit of hindsight, I would realize how crazy this entire approach had been, but of course I wasn’t thinking straight at this point in the process.

I hooked everything back up again and if anything, the flow was even worse. I was beginning to despair, because believe me, the fact of my ignoring all six of my amateur plumbing rules was not lost on me. Moreover, I was acutely aware that I really had no idea what the hell I was doing.

So I turned my attention to the head of the faucet. There was a little plastic cylinder between the hose and the head that was intriguing. It had no little flats to accept a wrench; no little arrows indicating how to twist anything; no little screws to unscrew. But there was a tiny plastic button (visible when I took off my glasses) that seemed to do nothing, but obviously existed for a reason. I pushed it in and twisted every which way at the cylinder it was embedded in, and eventually something broke free (at first I thought, horrified, that it had actually broken, based on the sound it made). Now, I was able to take the innards of the faucet head apart.

There was a ton of crap in there, tiny bits of rust like fine gravel, little jackstones and shards and whatnot, and I scraped them out with the pointy end of a chopstick. I put it all back together, struggled a bit due to the crudely made (but it must be said, thoughtfully designed) ring assembly, turned the faucet on, and—EUREKA!—the water came gushing out like a damn hydrant! Like Niagara Falls! I let out a whoop of pure joy. After the abject, willful stupidity I’d indulged in pursuing my benighted campaign against forces far greater than I, I’d somehow managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat!

I immediately poured a Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA and had my younger daughter help me create this celebratory Beck’st:

(Alas, I don’t have a “before” picture showing the faucet’s pathetic trickle of water from only half its jets. It never occurred to me to photograph it.)

I struggle to convey to you just how totally stoked I was to have won out against the rust clogging my faucet. To ignore so many warning signs and yet prevail … it was like something that only happens on TV, like in the final seven minutes of a “Star Trek” episode. Never mind that the repair itself, upon reflection, wasn’t actually ingenious or anything; the point was, I’d confronted a soul-crushing problem that had been increasingly weighing on me for months, and had kicked its ass!

For a couple minutes, with my mystified (and bored and hungry) kids looking on, I just turned that faucet on and off over and over, watching the water blast out like magic. I felt like Eeyore putting his (popped) birthday balloon into his (empty) honey pot and taking it back out again delightedly, declaring, “It goes in and out like anything.’”

The next morning, my wife was predictably astonished that I’d taken on such a foolhardy project at such an inopportune time. Examining my motivation after the fact, I was able to explain: while it’s true that I’d had half a dozen good reasons to put off my repair, I’m sure my dad had, too, with that toilet he never got around to installing. Waiting for some magic opportunity to bang out a home repair can be a slippery slope. Throughout my childhood, problems continually went unsolved or un-tackled and there was nothing I could do about it. As I make my own way through adult life, I find I’d rather crash and burn than risk continuing my dad’s legacy of procrastination.

Further reading

Dishwasher Man

Plumbing Emergencies for Dummies

The Sissy Syndrome

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