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install leaking plumbing
Sunday, December 15 2002
Darren finished his work today, doing some final touch-ups of primer in the rec room and my studio and putting a final coat of greyish-purple paint in the master bedroom. The paint ended up being a little dark, so we'll have to have lots of white details in there in order to cut through the gloom.
Louis came over in the afternoon to help with dropping the tub into what we hope will be its final resting place. With Darren's assistance and a system of ropes and hooks, we made a first unsuccessful attempt. It seems that one of the tub valve systems was protruding too far from the wall and the only thing that could be done was for me to "unsweat" the connections. It sucked to have to undo my previous work, but I'm so facile with a blowtorch these days that it only took me a couple minutes. Then, with a new path available to us, the tub went in without difficulty.
Interestingly, I notice that Darren has much less of a "typical guy talking to another guy" sense of humor than does Louis. Louis's humor is flavored with plenty of groan-inducing sexual inuendo, while Darren's is more situational and, like mine, mostly mines its comedic content from all that is fucked up in the world. Amazingly, though, when Darren is around Louis his humor suddenly includes sexual inuendo. Evidently he can sense the need for it and can find it in him to produce. For me, I just make a few fake chuckles and go on. I never reciprocate with the guy humor unless I have something really perverted to say. I wonder, by the way, if some guys don't think I'm very funny because my jokes contain few references to my penis.
I spent the rest of the evening fighting with the drainage plumbing of the tub, which (thankfully at least) was easy to access from the side even once the tub was in place. For some reason I couldn't stop a slow leak in a threaded joint in the horizontal metal pipe under the tub (the one connecting the tub's drain to the P trap and the overflow pipe). I tried various combinations of pipe thread compound and donuts made of plumbers putty, but nothing could make the leaking totally disappear. The leaking joint lies upstream from the stopper mechanism, so it tends to leak whenever there is a full tub of water pushing on it. Under full-tub conditions it leaked a drop of water through the pipe threads every 20 seconds or so. This wasn't all that bad really, and I almost convinced myself it was tolerable. To make it more so, I used some glue to stick a plastic jar on top of the PVC plumbing down in the floor, positioned strategically under the leak. I even installed a wick made of paper to facilitate the evaporation of any water that accumulates, which, at the observed rate, would come to less than a teaspoon per day if the tub was continuously full. I hoped this was sufficient, but it never feels good to install leaking plumbing, and I found it difficult to move on to other projects in need of my attention.
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