So adventures in electricity are over and I was ready to replace some broken parts on the stove and refrigerator, when I saw that the guys doing the painting didn’t notice the quarter-inch copper line that was connected to the ice maker, and crimped it is several places. The line was too old to attempt to save it, so I decided to replace it with plastic tubing.

I knelt down behind the refrigerator to pull the copper out of the cabinet and my knee sank down about two inches. That wasn’t normal, nor were the earthworms who had been living in the rotted remnants of the original flooring. I showed the guy doing the carpentry the problem and listened to him vent about old houses, as I removed the line.

It took me a couple of minutes to realize that the water had been off in this house for a month before we started working on it, more than enough time for the floor to have dried, but it was damp.

It took a strong light and some patience to discover that the pipes to the kitchen faucet were seeping. The person who replaced the original galvanized pipes with CPVC plastic pipes had used a threaded CPVC adapter to connect to the shut-off valves and used massive amounts of thread goop to seal them. After a while the connection started to seep water. It wasn’t an obvious drip and with all of the stuff people store under the sink it is unlikely that it would have been noticed as is kept the floor under the vinyl damp and decaying.

Off to the store for parts, and then replace the electrical tools with plumbing tools. There is no point in trying to install the new flooring until the leak is stopped, the floor has dried, and the bad area is fixed.

Every time you do something in an old house, you discover one or more additional things that have to be done before you can do what you started out to do. Sigh….