On 30/11/2013 19:07, SteveW wrote:
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


The joys of the property bubble! I don't know how the buggers sleep at
night.
My son's electrician drilled through the gas pipe last week, and missed
the mains water supply by half an inch. Neither was anywhere near where
you'd expect them to be. Needless to say the cables were running
diagonally across the kitchen wall, and all this behind a posh Smeg
cooker.