For those of you who haven't tried to re-plumb your entire house - and I imagine that is quite a few of you - it is a very time consuming task. On one of our trips to town, the cashier at the store joked with us that on average home owners will make 7 trips to the store for plumbing supplies when they're doing a project. Well, we lost count of exactly how many trips we took in to town to purchase plumbing parts. But, we do know that our record for number of trips in a single day was 7. Yup, 7 trips to Lowes, Home Depot or Menards in a single day. By the 5th trip, you're starting to get strange looks from the cashiers.

Why so many trips to the store? Well, unlike framing, plumbing requires certain sizes of pipes for certain things and certain types of bends and drops between things. In an attempt to be pro-active, we tried to plan out the plumbing for the entire house. The drawing we submitted to the inspector had a list of all the pipes and fittings we'd be using. Once he approved it, Tyler went to the store and purchased EVERYTHING! Then, we went home and started connecting everything up. That is when we found that one thing - usually a board to couldn't be moved - that required us to reroute the pipe. Why was that such a big deal? Well, that completely changed the design of the pipe from the point on. So, that usually meant that we had at least 1 fitting that we were short. So, in to town we'd go. On average, we'd find 2-3 things per weekend that we had to contend with. And that is how trips to the store add up while plumbing.

Once we got all of the plumbing in and cemented, we thought the worst was behind us. Then the inspector said, "So, you're ready for your pressure test then?" Pressure test? What the heck is a pressure test and how do you pressure test a pipe that is open to the sky on one end and a huge underground cement box on the other? Well, you stick a balloon in it of course. I kid you not. There are special testers that you purchase that are basically stiff rubber balloons that can be inserted into the DWV cleanouts. The balloon testers, as they're called, are used to stop water from flowing down the DWV into the septic system. Then, you climb to the top and fill the whole thing full of water. If everything is good, the water stays in the pipe. If everything is not good, the water DOESN"T stay in the pipe. And, of course our DWV had problems.

When Tyler and I first saw that little drip of water on the DWV, we were beside ourselves. We thought that the inspector was going to require us to rip the whole thing out and start all over again. That was when we were introduced to the wonderous thing known as "Goop". The inspector said that the pipe just had to hold water and that it didn't have to look pretty. So, we could use the Goop around the seams where the pipe was leaking. The only problem was finding all of the leaks. Since the water would flow down the vertical pipe, one leak could easily be covered up by another leak higher up on the pipe. And, since the Goop took 24 hours to cure, we had a lot of downtime between pressure test attempts.

All in all, I think we did 5-6 pressure tests. The last pressure test we did, I was standing in the yard keeping track of how close the lightning strikes were getting and yelling at Tyler that he was an idiot. If you need to know why, just look at the following picture. On top of the house, on a metal ladder during a thunderstorm... yup, that's my husband.

Thankfully, the water held! So, Tyler took half a day of vacation today so he could have the plumbing inspector come out and sign off on the plumbing.