DIY home plumbing repairs, indoors and outdoors

If you use piping already in the house to give yourself a head start, you can bring both indoor and outdoor plumbing up to date with a minimum of elbow grease and expense.  Small jobs may prove as rewarding as big ones.  Simply putting a pressure-reducing valve on a squealing water line will quiet the whole house–and protect all its fixtures from harmful vibration.  Substituting a single-lever faucet for two old-fashioned ones will make it possible for you to mix water to your choice of temperature without setting down the pan or shampoo bottle you already have in one hand.

Once you get started, seemingly complicated projects often turn out remarkably straightforward.  When you replace and old fixture with a new one in the same location, the plumbing connections are simple mechanical fittings; no soldering, threading or cementing is involved.  Replacing a rickety water guzzler with a stylish, scientifically engineered toilet, for example, is mostly a matter of loosening nuts with a wrench to take the old tank off of the bowl and the old bowl off the floor and then reversing the process to bolt the new fixture in place.  Chances are the trickiest part will be lifting the components–vitreous china is fragile as well as heavy, so you may need a helper to maneuver the bowl and tank safely.

Lavatories call for even less effort to replace.  Ready-made fittings fo into place quickly.  Wall-mounted sinks are hung like pictures from specially designed brackets packaged into the basins.  Modern vanity-type lavatories are simply set into counters or fastened there with screws or bolts.  Neither kind of sink is difficult to add to a place where you do not have, but want, one: a darkroom, a bedroom, a mud room; you must extend the drain and supply lines, but if you observe the so-called critical distance between the fixture and existing pipes, you need not install a special vent pipe.

Outdoor plumbing, which most builders neglect because of the digging involved, may pay the richest dividends of all for the amateur.  With a bit of trenching and rudimentary piping, youcan treat children to an outdoor shower close to the back door or indulge yourself in a step-saving lawn hydrant next to the flower garden.  If you want to shoot the works, you can even build in a sprinkling system and connect it to an electric timer that will turn the whole apparatus on and off automatically.

In all modernizing–additions as well as replacements–keep in mind that you never need feel limited by the materials of your present piping.  Adaper fittings make it possible to join new pipes to old ones.  And, in more and more communities, local codes permit you to use plastic to shortcut your plumbing projects.