Plumbing

Our backyard water line had been leaking for a while. It was a slow leak but we finally got around to fixing it. We thought it would be an easy fix to swap out the old leaking faucet for a new one. It turned out the old faucet pieces were welded together so when Mike tried to twist them apart, they broke. Yikes! The water was turned off to the whole house so we tried our best to fix it:

We didn’t want to enlarge the hole in the stucco so Mike went under the house thinking he could fix it that way. The view of the pipe from inside the crawl space:

Unfortunately, Mike couldn’t fix it that way either. He ran to the store to find a cap to at least plug the pipe so we could turn the water back on.

We ended up hiring a professional plumber to fix it. The plumber replaced the whole pipe. He didn’t want to go under the house though so he cut through the nearby crawl space vent instead (we temporarily plugged it with steel wool). The finished pipe:

Also the white PVC pipe that goes into the ground/rocks actually snakes through the yard and pops up at the other end of the yard as another faucet. A past homeowner installed it. I asked the plumber for a quote to replace it with a pipe under the house instead – the proper way. The plumber quoted us around $1,000 but he really didn’t want the job so I didn’t pursue it.

Later, we added a new crawl space vent on top of the busted one. Mike just hammered it on – it’s a tight fit:

So much for an easy plumbing fix!