Soil Pipes and Useless Joists

Our house has a very small bathroom: 2.1 x 1.5 metres (although it is 3 metres high!).  We usually use a shower not a bath, but feel that a house does need a bath, so we were looking at options of using part of a bedroom for a bath when inspiration struck.  Various suppliers do shower baths which are "P" shaped, so you shower standing in a decent area which is also flat; the inspiration was to discover that they also do these - wait for it - exactly 1.5 metre long.  This then fixes the design of the bathroom as there is only one way that can fit everything in.

Part of this design is that the toilet has to be moved, and this necessitates changing the branch in the soil pipe from left hand (135 degrees) to right hand (112.5 degrees), and moving the branch up a small way.  See existing arrangement, right.  So, this week, I have started by lifting the bathroom floor and removing three feet of the internal soil pipe which is four inch diameter lead pipe.  Being a foul pipe this could have been an awful job but, since the toilet has not been used for ages, it was all dry and so not too bad at all.  The wall of the bathroom was one of the really damp places in the house due to the state of the roof, and so (with the roof fixed) I was very surprised to find dampness still present in the floor.  This was doubtless related to the discovery of a 6mm hole in the side of the lead pipe!  I also found that the toilet had been moved once before as the pipe once went through a large cut-out in the second joist from the wall.  The joist is 7" x 1.75" and the cut-out is almost 6" deep (see gap in front of the pipe in photo left).  This hole had been ignored subsequently when they fitted the floorboards, which had spanned the gap and rested on the rotten end joist... 

Unfortunately, as so often happens, another job appeared whilst doing this one.  The plaster of the hall ceiling under the bathroom floor is not just lath but was actually rotten lath held up by plasterboard.  This combination was in a very bad state (due to the hole in the soil pipe) and, in the corner under the lead pipe (above) the board was not attached to the rotten joist at all!  In no time it was all down in a heap on the floor.  Standing on the few remaining bits of floorboard on joists with just space below is surprisingly disconcerting.

Back to the joists: I quite enjoy this sort of joinery.  Fortunately both joists have good wood at the ends so I have fitted a 6" doubler to each joist, attached to the originals with a copious number of 70mm screws.  In doing this I found that the second joist had predictably split in the middle where the six inch gap started, so I added a couple of screws upwards to re-attach that as well.  In the photo from underneath (see left, before I did the first joist), there is a line of light visible between my doubler and the original second joist - this is where the cut-out was.


The other job was to start removal of the old external soil/vent pipe.  This is an unexpected expense as, to install the new branch, the pipe has to be rebuilt from the ground right up to the (new) flashing in the (new) roof.  I have started by grinding off the old external toilet outlet (right) to remove the pipe in the wall, so that I can progress inside.  We will need to dismantle the old stack, order the required new bits (if we can save any?) and then re-build it all when the new outlet has been fitted.  All that is a joy for a later week! Happy days.