Late on Wednesday afternoon, while I was working in my office (in our basement), I noticed a tiny stream of water running down the wall -- never a good sign. When I went to investigate further, I realized that the carpet near the wall was completely soaked. Really not good. The leak was right below our kitchen sink, which had just been snaked the week before after the disposal backed up. It couldn't be coincidental.
We called up a plumber, who came out at 7:30 this morning. After talking about the problem, he said, Well, you've got to find the source of the leak. I can tear your walls apart for several hours at $150/hour, or you can try it yourself. I was pretty up for saving $600, so I told him I'd call him later. As a new homeowner, my toolbox is still pretty light, so I headed to the hardware store and picked up a 2" hole saw, a little flexible mirror, and a jab saw.
I was pretty sure that the drain line from the kitchen sink was just a vertical run into the basement, where it turned into a horizontal run. The plumber warned me that it might not be that simple, since there might be a lot of horizontal line to get to vent line, which we could see (from looking at the roof) was many feet away from the sink. He suggested that I start tracing the line starting in the kitchen, punching holes and peeking around until I found the leak. That sounded a little crazy to me. My gut told me that the leak was near the basement, not the kitchen. And since the cost of starting in the basement and being wrong was less than the cost of starting in the kitchen and being wrong, it was clear that the basement was where to start.
To cut to the chase: my hunch was right. Photos and details of finding the problem are in this photo album. The leak was pretty nasty, but it's isolated to a single wye joint and should be pretty easy to replace. The plumber's coming out tomorrow to replace it, so we'll see how it goes. The really good news is that, despite this leak looking like a long standing problem, there's no damage to the framing members. The first thing I did was poke a screwdriver at the sill plate, but it looks solid. What a relief.
In his classic How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler talks about how marking up a book with notes and underlining, far from defacing it, personalizes it and makes it your own. The same is true of a house, I've found. The first time you put a hole in your wall, you switch from mere mortgage payer to true homeowner. Well, the first time you deliberately put a hole in your wall, that is.
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