Score-Stuff-Smash

To lay the cement board, we have to cut holes in it -- allowing the pipes under the sink and the pipe for the toilet to rise into the bathroom. One of the enhancements we're aiming to achieve with the rework of the bathroom is moving our toilet back 2".

It would seem like a small thing, but the bathroom is only 42" across. Old toilets had 14" tanks on the back. New toilets, like the one installed in the house (now sitting in our screened porch... hee hee), have thinner -- 12" -- tanks.

Whoever replaced the original toilet with a newer one used the original hole/pipe for the toilet drain, meaning there was a two-inch gap between the tank and the wall behind it. The knees of people who sat on it were pretty snug against the wall in front of them.

Since our plumbers are replacing all the scary pipe beneath the bathroom with PVC, we're moving the pipe/hole back two inches. Hence the need to smash the old cast iron and the expectation of an explosion.

Before we attempted that, we sawed off a radiator pipe that we'll never use in the bathroom. It would have been a no-brainer, but we thought hard about it because in the basement it's insulated with asbestos.


Boo to asbestos and mesophelioma.

We also prepared ourselves mentally and materially to destroy the cast iron downstairs. We developed a score-stuff-smash strategy. We used the same hack saw as we did to cut the radiator pipe to score the big cast iron downstairs. We owed this bit of genius to Lou and Sally.

Then we wrapped the part of the pipe we aimed to break in half a towel. With the other half of the towel, we stuffed the inside of the pipe from above.


It's very important not to let pieces of the shattered pipe fall into the rest of pipe; waterflow could be restricted in the future, necessitating further expense.

Then came the smashing part, but unfortunately, it wouldn't smash. We didn't want to break it on the curve; we wanted to break it above the curve (reducing the chance that pieces could fall in the pipe), and this meant we had significant obstructions -- beams, other pipes, asbestos. So we couldn't use the sledge hammer to really do damage. Instead we were using the regular hammer, a screw driver and a drill.


After all our efforts, we had to go to sleep last night with the pipe half-demolished. There's a huge, jagged hole in the front, along with three drilled holes through the back.


Our 7.2-volt drill (The little guy has served me well, Meg, over many years!) is going to be the key ingredient to finishing the job today... enshallah.