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August 28, 2007
Ouch...
Rob and I discovered a damp area of flooring in our downstairs bathroom a
couple of months ago. We pulled up the floor tiles and found the concrete
foundation was saturated. We called a plumber and they gave us some
suggestions of inexpensive things to try that might fix the problem.
Unfortunately (and predictably) the cheap solutions didn't work. We feared
the pipe under the concrete foundation was leaking so we called him out again.
He jack-hammered the concrete floor and cut 4 holes in our walls to find the
leak. Several hours and $1,200 later and it's finally fixed. 
Ouch.
The unbelievable thing is what was actually causing the problem... It was the
pipe coming down through the wall from our upstairs bathroom. Our damn
builder apparently put a screw-cap on the PVC drainage pipe, presumably for
the purpose of it being an easy access point in case there was a clog. That
cap wasn't screwed on tightly enough, causing it to leak down and soak into the
concrete below! 
To add insult to injury the damn builder put no access door to actually get
to that screw-cap, so even if there was a clog you would have to cut a hole in
the wall to get to it! 
The picture below is where he jack-hammered the floor, only to learn the leak
wasn't there. Click the link to see more photos:
 |
 |
| The red arrow below indicates where an
access door SHOULD have been.
|
| The offending screw-cap.
|
You can bet if I could find our builder I'd be taking a $1,200 bite out of his ass right now.
Posted by pixelbrat at August 28, 2007 11:16 PM