My First Hole in the Wall

I've torn my first hole in the ceiling and wall behind the shower to expose a leaky pipe. Taking a drill and drywall saw to an otherwise relatively fine looking wall is a big step.

We noticed a stain on the ceiling and wall behind the shower would darken every time we showered, and the area felt wet to the touch. I found it hard to understand why the previous owners would run the shower supply lines over the back of the shower, but that had to be the problem. Right?

So Saturday morning, after a trip to the hardware store, I drilled then cut into the drywall. Small hole. Bigger hole. Bigger hole. Bigger hole.

Finally, I'd exposed enough to locate not water supply pipes but the 4" PVC sewer vent pipe. This section of the pipe had a couple elbows as it went over then up to join the original cast iron pipe that goes up through the roof to let sewer gas out and air in during draining. Strange though, as this pipe should be dry since all the drains are below this point. The supply pipes for the shower were nowhere to be found.

I turned on the shower and let it run. No leaks. Yet the remaining stain on the wall darkened.

Ah, shoot. It became obvious now that the wall had been previously patched and painted over. However, they apparently hadn't primed with a shellac-based stain-killer paint, so whenever we showered and water condensed a little on the wall, the stain would show through. Since it was obvious that the wall had been patched, I assumed that the leak had been patched as well at some point in the past and I'd just cut a big hole in the wall for nothing, when some primer and new paint would have done the trick. Sigh.

I packed up the tools and planned what I'd need to start my first drywall patch job.

Early Sunday morning, around 3:30 AM, my pager went off with a problem at work. I fiddled on the computer downstairs for a half hour or so to fix the problem, then headed back to bed. A soft rain was falling outside. I walked past the bathroom door. The house was dark and quiet.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Ah ha! Rain!

I climbed the ladder I'd left in the shower stall and there it was. The second elbow on the PVC pipe was dropping a single drip every few seconds. It wasn't running into the wall anymore, but was dropping off the end of the horizontal framing over the door clear to the floor inside the wall. The rain was falling into the open sewer vent pipe and eventually finding this pinhole leak in the PVC fitting. Left alone, it would eventually work its way down into the kitchen ceiling, leaving a trail of rotted wood along the way.

So, the hole in the wall turned out to be a good thing, and after a couple more trips to the hardware store, I'm now armed with some epoxy, fiberglass tape, and a big rubber coupler with clamps that I'm going to attempt a patch with. A better fix would be to replace the problem pipe with new pipe, properly primed and glued. However, that would require a monster-sized hole in the wall and a new venture into some serious plumbing, something I'm not yet prepared to do. I'll clean it and patch it and hope for the best.

Then come spring, I'll look for a rain-diverting vent cap (do they make them for sewer vents?) and hire someone with a long ladder and an absent fear of heights to scramble up on the roof and put it on.