The Dig

I found myself with a couple of free hours this afternoon and in a fit of motivation decided to go under my house and see if I could determine what the issue is with my front hose spigot.  It has had low water pressure since this summer and two weeks ago when I was under the house for a kitchen investigation I saw that the dirt around the spigot pipe was damp.

Growing up I often thought it would be really cool to be an archaeologist, so I tried to reframe this as an adventure.  I zipped up in my zoot suit, donned my work boots, got a big light, a shovel, a hand trowel, put my cell phone in a Ziploc bag and down I went.  This is what it looked like before I started digging; from the slope of the dirt it looks like I am not the first one to dig out around this pipe.  So much for any cool archaeological finds...

The top of that pipe sticks out on the surface side and is the spigot.  You can see how the dirt at the base is a darker color due to dampness.  The good news is, damp dirt is really easy to dig into to move.

Most of the horizontal pipe leading to the vertical was already above ground.  I had maybe 3 feet that I needed to excavate and the most that it was underground was about 6 inches.  I alternated between my hand trowel for the detail work right along the pipe, and the shovel for sloping the steeper sides.

My first impediment were some tiny -- about the diameter of a pencil or less -- tree roots.  Ah ha!  I thought... that's what's going on.  As I uncovered more the pipe I also thought maybe the whole pipe was just corroded and sort of oozing/leaking.  As I dug, the dampness extended further up the pipe away from the foundation than I had realized.

The soil was cool and it smelled damp and earthy - just like our fruit cellar growing up where we used to go hide out during bad weather -- with the whole family there with you it was sort of a party.   (Or, the sort of scary place where you had to go to get onions and potatoes for mom at dinner time when you couldn't bribe an older sister to go in your place.  I always grabbed whatever potatoes were closest to the door -- never caring if bigger and better ones were at the top of pile.)  And again, nothing creepy crawly made an appearance - for which I am always very grateful.

And then as I followed the pipe towards the foundation and looked where I was headed, I realized that um, these two pipes are not going to meet:

So the next logical thought is that there is a horizontal pipe there at the base of the foundation, right?  Right.  Except not.  As I dug more, no horizontal connector pipe was appearing.  And then I stuck my fingers back behind the horizontal pipe at its base... it's a sick joke right?  The pipe has a 90 degree angle all right -- and it goes under the foundation, away from me.  The connection is on the outside of the foundation, not inside where I was digging.

The good news - because I try hard to be a positive person - the good news is that I didn't hit a gusher.  (Well not on THIS side anyway...)  And, more good news is that the leak was probably really good for my Japanese Maple and my Yew on the other side during the summer drought.  Talk about deep watering of the tap roots...

But I do think that what I presume is a crack in the pipe was caused by a tree root.  A slow, gradual crack is going on is my guess.  Here's a close up, and I can see a lighter color horizontal tree root there between the pipes.

I guess my next task is to dig on the other side.  And that's going to be a whole lot more digging than this was - but hey, at least I'll be topside when I do it!

Crawl Space Excursion

Last weekend I went on an investigative trip under my house to see if I could figure out why my kitchen is always the coldest room in the house*, and why, if I put my face down near the floor in front of my washer/dryer that there is enough breeze to blow my hair back.

Last year in a fit of desperation I put Gorilla Tape all along the bottom of my baseboards where they met the floor (just in the laundry area, you can't see ii I swear!)  It helped a tiny bit but not enough.  With the washer/dryer pulled out I simply cannot see any big holes that would account for the draftiness.

So under the house I went.  I knew that at some point before my time someone had reconfigured the back of the house mostly because when I tore down the old wooden deck it revealed a set of concrete stairs 5 feet to the right of where my back doors are -- and when I looked closely at the brick above them I could see that there used to be a door there and it had been bricked in.  

Here is a post with a photo of the old deck.  So to the right of the doggie door and to the left of the electrical meter is where the old door was.. http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2010/12/foundation-to-build-upon.html

(This renovation also explained how a 1929 house had a doggie door within the brick wall -- I am pretty sure doggie doors with metal sides and sliding doors didn't exist in 1929...)  Anyway, the view under the house also confirmed the reconfiguration, although it didn't shed any light on the specifics.

Last week I went to the Dallas Public Library to get a copy of the original house plans -- multiple sources had told me they were on file there -- they are not -- and the librarian said she wished she knew who had started that rumor -- but I did find other information about Nettie and her family which is just SO interesting -- but alas, another post!

I could see that while the sub floor in the rest of the house was diagonal planking, the area under the laundry area was simply plywood.  And it was clear that some re-jiggering had been done before me -- and sort of rigged.  And I found a huge hole where the electrical for the dryer ran up from under the crawl space up into the wall, and I could see all the way up, through the wall, to what I  believe was the ceiling!  My light wasn't strong enough to reach all the way up, so who knows if it went to the ceiling or all the way into the attic.  Um yes, hello drafty...

Fast forward to yesterday... Red and I went to  Home Depot and bought some R 5.0 rated foam insulation in a 4'x8' sheet.  (As it turned out we should have bought 2.)  We were able to cut it and fill 2 full "bays" -- we put it up against the sub floor and tacked it up with blocks of wood on the sides of the joists.  Red also stuffed some regular pink rolled insulation up into the opening that the electrical runs through and we blocked another similar hole nearby.

I also have an area of hardwood floor right inside my back door that has a little too much give in it when you walk on it.  I measured inside the house to pin point where that area was, and then did the same measurement down under the house and discovered that the sub floor had been cut off (where the plywood began) and that the ends of those sub floor planks weren't supported.  We added a 2"x6" on its edge with hangers between the joists to support that.  It helped some, but taking a closer look at the floor from up in the kitchen, the hardwood floor boards aren't properly attached to the sub floor.  It is an area that is maybe 6-8 planks and it's maybe 1-2 feet lengthwise.  (For now I'm not doing anything about that, now that I know it isn't a structural issue.)

I took my phone down with me, intending to take photos (and I won't lie, I wanted a form of communication in the unlikely event I somehow got locked in down there.  Irrational.  Whatever.) but it was in a zippered pocket under my zippered zoot suit, and I never did retrieve it to capture the moment.  Here is one photo that I took last week on my investigative mission -- it shows a split in one of the sub floor planks.

I have a few others too, but it's difficult to tell what they are out of context so I won't torture you with them...

I also discovered that the pipe that leads up to my front of the house water spigot must have a leak in it.  The dirt around it is damp...The good news is, all but about 2 feet of the pipe is already above ground and exposed so I don't have a ton of unearthing to do.  And the part that is underground is not very far underground.  And, it isn't a gusher leak -- the area isn't muddy, just damp -- but I do need to take care of that.

We are both sore today -- lots of duck walking while carrying things, lots of sitting on piles of rocks and brick and then working overhead.  I will see next time it gets cold here if it's improved, but it seems like it will have to be.  Maybe when I am doing there doing that I will also pile up the broken bricks and larger rocks to the middle area, away from the perimeter which is the path of travel... And this time when I go I will definitely wear a breathing mask in addition to the Tyvek zoot suit.  It's super dusty down there.  (But bug free, which is the most important thing of all in my book.)

*  Another thing to check off on my 2012 Manifesto!  Yay me!