As someone who likes to make drawings that look like things and adhere to some level of artistic expression, today I’d like to share something that is … not that.
Backing up, I had another Adventure in Home Ownership.
This particular one started with smelling gas in our utility room. The gas company sent someone within an hour—on a Saturday night. The nice man with an electric sniffer told us we had eight (8) leaks, shut off the gas to the house at the main, and told us we could have nice things again—like central heat and hot water—when we got it fixed. It was February. In Chicagoland.
I poured one out for the lost-to-me joys of competent landlords and started reaching out to friends and neighbors for plumber recommendations (and space heaters), all while mentally tabulating exactly how ruinously expensive an emergency plumber on a Sunday would be.
It was at this point that the spousal unit told me his dad would be coming over first thing tomorrow.
My father-in-law is exactly the person you want around should you get yourself into the mess of buying a fixer-upper. He has spent decades doing competent home improvement projects, mostly on his own.
I figured the married-to family would take care of it while I did other things on Sunday, but then the spousal unit came down with some bug, and that’s when I got to learn how to replace gas lines.
Turns out, it isn’t hard (especially if you’ve got Dave in your corner), but it requires a good bit of thinking and planning if you don’t want to put yourself in more of a fix than you started with, and/or want to keep hardware store trips to four or fewer.
Now, onto the merits of crummy drawings!
The drawing above shows Phase 1 of the project. Dave had done some gas work before, so he knew what the heck the pieces were called, and which sorts of pieces we needed. This was great since I knew nothing about it and had never looked at a gas system with any level of interest before this exact moment.
Now, once you understand the types of pieces that exist and how they connect, the whole thing reduces to a bunch of measuring and a logic puzzle. And upper body and grip strength—that’s important, too.
But for the logic puzzle part, there is no tool as powerful as a pencil and some paper.
This particular drawing routes a gas supply line of unknown length (hence, Phase 2’s problem) through a union (a thinger that lets you connect threaded pipes to one another) and connects it to a T-joint where the size of the line changes, and routes the flow to the furnace (the only part that didn’t leak1), and another T-joint that goes to the water heater and the dryer.
Thankfully, the gas stove got ripped out when the kitchen got upgraded from the 1950s to the 1990s, which meant there was no chance of having to go spelunking through walls2 to track down and repair yet more gas leaks. Hallelujah.
All in all, it’s not an enormously complicated system, but it does need an exact solution. Which means: make some crummy drawings!
We measured the existing lines for a starting point, but decided we’d be better off taking out the old pipes and installing new ones, removing some pipes-to-nowhere on the way. Starting where the main comes into the house, we worked our way to where it branched out and sized down for the various appliances it supplies. Every segment got drawn in and, by virtue of drawing it out on paper, we could look at each job the system needed to do. The drawing let us isolate each individual component and only have to solve one (1) tiny problem to think through at a time.
Each component had a type, one or more diameters, and in the case of the pipes, a length. Each of these was easily recorded on the crummy drawing, and it was obvious if some part was missing. Some pieces, such as the exact length of the supply line, were not knowable before a chunk of the problem had been physically solved. Another part, the rigid piping that needed to wrap around the water heater to conform to building codes, was too complicated to figure out (at least for us amateurs) before the first phase was completed.
The drawing also let me put together a complete shopping list of the parts we knew we needed, illustrated to make sure the things we put in the cart matched exactly the things listed. This may sound trivial, but it was a huge time- and brain-saver when facing a wall of black pipes and connectors in every size sold.
Once we got back to the basement, that same crummy sketch gave us our marching orders for what needed to be done, which part went where, and how the whole system (thus far) should come together. None of this is readily apparent when you dump a bag of components onto your basement floor.
Once we had finished Phase 1, we had enough information for Phase 2. With the first round of complexity solved, the formerly-unknowables now became variables we could solve for. So I made an even crummier drawing.
This one shows in excruciating (and poorly drafted) detail the bits we needed to run hard pipes to the hot water heater (shown here as a small box), as well as the needed length of supply line, also shown as a small box. Representational drawing this isn’t, but functional drawing it is.
We made trip number 2 to the hardware store with another illustrated list in hand (including a bonus illustration because I have not the faintest clue what those little screw thingies are called, but they are darn good for strapping pipes to the ceiling joists for mechanical support).
As you can see, there were two small pipes that we didn’t know the length of. Given that it was 4:45 p.m. on Sunday, and the hardware store closed at 5 p.m., I bought our best guess at what we needed, plus the next length up and down for each. This is the part of the process where a professional returns to their van, which is stocked with all these little bits and bobs. Alas, I do not have such a well-provisioned van.
All said, Dave and his trusty sidekick (me) had the system rebuilt and up to code by supper time, which would not have been possible without these crummy drawings.
When you are trying to wrap your head around something, don’t try to do it in your head.
Get everything out where you can see what you are working with, and record your solutions as you figure them out. Plenty of daunting problems can be solved one teensy step at a time if you’ll get out a pencil and some paper and make a crummy (yet functional) drawing.
The joke’s on us! It turns out that while the gas lines to the furnace were the only non-busted ones in the joint, the precipitating incident for this whole situation was a faulty valve in our year-old furnace! With that said, eight is a lot of gas leaks. And they are gone now. As confirmed multiple times by the nice men who work for our gas company until we finally figured out it was the furnace when a piece of metal heat shielding burned off and shorted two wires, causing the breaker to keep tripping, this time depriving us of heat in March (in Chicagoland).
Don’t worry; the prior owner left the pipe there, and so did we, though it is no longer attached to the rest of the gas system. Also, induction stoves are great! I'm never going back!