Sometimes history is written in unexpected scripts...like the loops and curls of ancient plumbing pipe underneath our poorly-draining kitchen sink. Husband bravely explored crawl space and found a weird situation.In this drawing, the kitchen is the little add-on room at the top. #2 is the washing machine, #3 is the kitchen sink. #10 is some twirly flexible pipe added from the tankless water heater above the washer to the kitchen sink. At any rate, the kitchen sink and washer are draining into a big pipe that heads east out of the east end of the kitchen.
This big pipe appears to have once been connected to the toilet (#5) and tub (#7) drains. Now, the big pipe is severed. A newer pipe, (#6), takes the bathroom drainage out the front, or western side, of the house towards the street, in which there are manholes that YCUA occasionally accesses.
Our 1948 one-street subdivision, optimistically named "Audubon Gardens," consists of mostly tiny 780-square-foot homes. Was there an original sewer line to the east? Was this cheaply or inefficiently done? Was a later better one built under the street? Why was only part of the home drainage left connected to the eastward one? Where is that eastward effluent going?
Our effort to solve the mystery of the slow kitchen drain has raised more questions about the house's history than it answered.
