On 30/11/2013 09:25, stuart noble wrote:
On 30/11/2013 09:12, Tim Lamb wrote:
In message , Tim Watts
writes
On Friday 29 November 2013 23:02 SteveW wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I am currently in the middle of re-doing our bathroom. Tomorrow the
bath
and its waste pipe are due to come out. This morning I was having a
shower, only for my wife to shout that water was coming through the
ceiling. Normally I'd have stopped showering and investigated, but my
current contract is ending and I was due at an interview for another
company at 08:00, so had no choice but to finish off.

Got back at lunchtime to find a chunk of the hall ceiling on the floor
and chunks of plasterboard falling off every few minutes.

After 18 years in the house, a joint in the middle of the waste pipe
that has been there longer than that has slipped off the day before it
was due to be ripped out.

I presume it was disturbed by the other work - or maybe it was a
pre-emptive strike.

SteveW

Oh man - what a bitch!

My mother referred to this phenomena as *the animosity of inanimate
objects*


Sounds like it had always been an acccident waiting to happen due to the
incompetence of a human. I'm with the inanimate objects on this one

I've found a few booby traps over the years.

This one is where they have run the waste from the bath to outside, but
tee-d in a connection from the washbasin - where the push-fit tee was
hanging from the bottom of a 45° pipe, with no other support for the tee
or the pipe! Of course all this was hidden under the floor, under the bath.

A previous one, discovered when there was some work on the water mains
and some grit stuck the ball-cock slightly open, was that when fitting
the overflow to the header tank, they'd changed their minds after
drilling a small hole through the tank (looks like they'd used a high
speed wood drill, but stopped when only the tip had gone through) - of
course they'd not sealed off the hole and then had fitted the overflow
on the other side and three inches higher! I found that one, when
getting up at 04:00 for a business trip, I squelched across the landing.

I also found the obligatory nail through the lead gas pipe and another
gas pipe turning through 180° and almost flat at the top of the curve.

SteveW