I posted earlier about the issue with getting a new toilet installed.
That's taken care of ... but there's now another plumbing problem that
my plumber and I are facing.

Our house, as you could probably gather from my post about the toilet,
is very old. The pipes underneath the house are cast iron. There's a
pipe that runs from our kitchen sink's drain down to a cast iron pipe
in the basement (unfinished dirt basement) where I guess it runs to
the main line.

There has been a leak around the place where the pipe from the sink
drain connects to the pipe in the basement and water has been pouring
from around it. It's not been an acute issue, because the placement of
the pipe makes the water run right down into where our sump pump is at
to remove any condensation, rain water, etc., that gets into the
basement. So while the water around the pump may get a bit soapy
(we're Luddites, don't have a dishwasher, still do 'em the old-
fashioned way), it doesn't pool up because the pump pulls it out.

That was actually why I first contacted the plumber ... and it's taken
a while because plumbers in my neck of the woods are kind of busy
right now; people must be doing a lot of repairing instead of buying
new stuff ... the toilet issue developed afterward. He inspected it
and saw that the pipe was broken up at the top.

He came back today to take care of this issue (didn't get to do it
yesterday since toilet was so problematic), went downstairs with his
Sawzall with a cast-iron blade to try to cut out the offending piece
of cast iron ... and the entire pipe broke. I'm not sure how extensive
"broke" is, my wife was there, I've been at work and am typing this on
a break, I'll see the damage when I get home.

The plumber is supposed to come back in a couple of days to try to fix
the issue, he had other commitments that he could not break for this
afternoon. As I said, it's not a horribly acute issue because none of
the water was going into the pipe to the main line anyway, the break
was so big, and everything is still going right into the sump pump to
be pulled out.

I'm just wondering how big and complicated an issue fixing this will
be.