Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 4, Pipes In Stone Walls
Our stone Carriage House was built in the late 1700s before indoor electricity and plumbing existed.
Just think about that for a minute.
If you had to do your business outside, that building is old.
If you want to do your business inside this old building, some retrofitting is going to have to happen.
Today, we are going to talk about the pipes in our Carriage House and how they clogged up the flow of our restoration progress as we’ve been repointing this building’s stone foundation.
To plumb an all stone building, you’re going to have to bust through the 18-inch thick stone foundation or walls in order to insert pipes.
We are immensely thankful that someone did that job for us decades ago in order to install plumbing and electrical service to this space. However, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post if it was all sunshine and roses.
It appears that pipes and wires had been inserted in the stone wall in multiple spots and later abandoned when the building’s utilities were updated or the building’s use changed. Each time this happened, it would seem as if no one really wanted to fix the stone wall correctly (I can understand the sentiment), so it languished.
By the time we started restoring this Carriage House so we can use it as a home gym, the building was in a state!
The situation with the pipes was worse than what this photo depicts. We didn’t realize everything that was going on until we started stripping back the layer of old lime mortar and concrete covering the wall.
As a side note, concrete is not good for fieldstone foundations and walls. It doesn’t allow the wall to breathe (take on and release humidity) and it also dries harder than the stones themselves, which can make the stones break.
After chipping away (literally) at the wall, it started to reveal its secrets.
Oh, hello, big clay pipe on the left and old lead pipes on the bottom right near the floor. Nice to see you’re still hanging around like a houseguest who has overstayed their welcome.
Let me give you a closer view of the pipes that were near the floor.
There were actually three of them. Two of them are disguised by the floor rubble, so don’t feel bad if you can’t spot them.
The one sticking out of the wall was the biggest offender. That can’t stay.
We had to remove the stones around the pipe in order to get a pipe cutter and our hands in the gap.
Remember, this pipe is abandoned. It isn’t connected to anything on either end.
We cut the pipe off inside the wall approximately six inches so that when we repointed this wall you would never know it was here.
If you want to play I Spy, the repaired area is in the bottom lefthand corner of the photo below. I filled the gap with two square-ish rocks stacked on top of each other.
The next set of pipes we had to deal with are actually pretty new and they are staying.
A new septic tank was installed around 7 years ago. As part of that upgrade, the crew installed new PVC pipes to the bathroom. It happened before our time and we were delighted that at least one thing around here was new when we moved in.
The construction crew secured the area around the pipe with concrete and left the rest a jumbled mess of loose rocks.
It could have been worse. They could have “fixed” the entire wall with concrete.
If I take off my Petty McPetterson hat for a moment, I can say, in fairness, it would have been difficult to find someone to fix this wall properly. There aren’t as many lime mortar masons as there used to be where we live.
Anyway, back to the task at hand. I removed the loose rocks and bricks from the wall.
You’d be surprised by how often we see a random brick inserted in a stone wall. I think these are indicative of attempts at repairs over the years or are used in situations where someone needed to use materials with size uniformity.
Once the wall was cleaned up, I started repairing it with new lime mortar and stone.
If you look at the wall directly to the left of the white pipe, you can see it is partially complete. If I’m doing a deep repair, sometimes it is helpful to do it in stages so that the mortar has time to set up before adding the face stones (the last stones visible on the wall face).
And here (see below) that section is fully complete.
What a difference, right?
I did have to leave a little bit of the concrete directly around the white pipe and the pipe wrapped in insulation. There wasn’t a lot of it and it seemed too risky to try and remove it, so I tried to blend it in as best as I could.
The last pipe that needed to be dealt with was a vitrified clay pipe.
Vitrified clay pipes are used as sewage pipes because they can handle your business and most anything else people put in sewage pipes.
About the only domestic and industrial waste they can’t handle is hydrofluoric acid.
We don’t know that this pipe was ever used as a sewage pipe. All we know for sure is that someone used it as conduit, which we thought was pretty clever.
We were going to use it as conduit too, until we dug down in the ground and realized that it was connected to another pipe behind it.
We know these pipes and wires no longer connect to the main house and we had done enough digging at that point in the process. Hand digging around a stone foundation isn’t as much fun as you’d think.
We ended up removing the clay pipe and all of the abandoned wires and pipes it was containing. It just took a hard pull and a twist to unlock it from the pipe it was connected to.
That left us with a big hole in the wall. One we created ourselves.
Isn’t there a saying about digging yourself a hole?
Getting out of this hole, or filling it up, did take quite a bit of effort!
I didn’t count how many rocks I used, but it did take me a good five hours, working from both the inside and outside of the building, to fill the hole.
I don’t know if that’s a long or short amount of time for an amateur mason working solo. I’m the only one I know. Ha!
A significant chunk of the time is spent searching amongst the stone walls and piles on our property for stones that will fit in the gap. It’s a bit like putting together a puzzle but your kids scattered the pieces all over the house.
As a reminder, here’s how the wall started.
I apologize if this photo gives off horror movie vibes. You should have felt it in person.
Here’s how the wall looks now.
Much better, right?
As pretty as this stone is, we won’t see this wall when the restoration is finished. All of the pipes and wires are polluting the view, so we have a vague plan to section this area off and turn it into a utility closet.
If there is a moral to this story about pipes in stone walls, I think it would be to hide them!
Kidding! Partially.
The moral is that you just have to do the best you can with the situation. It might end up a little quirky, but these sorts of buildings thrive on quirky. It will be fine.
Do you have any questions about the process so far? Please let me know! You can always comment on this blog post, email me here, or reach out via Instagram or Facebook. I respond to all of your comments.
Cheers to that happy feeling we get by saving all the old buildings!
Thanks for hanging out with me today. I appreciate you engaging with a blog post even if you’re never going to live in or own a stone building. You rock! Here are some other blog posts you might enjoy.
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2 Comments
Laura L
So how is Mr Snake living in the wall doing? LOL
annisa
I don’t know! I haven’t seen him come out. I really hope he’s gone.