Ugh... Broken Water Pipes

We are just a few days away from our week long RV trip, and I promised I’d get the broken water pipes fixed before we left. This will allow us to use the RV’s toilet, rather than having to walk to the bathrooms. This is especially nice in the middle of the night when the kids have to use the can.

Just in case you’re wondering, the pipes broke because I left water in them over the winter, and the pipes froze, and burst. Oops!

I took apart the bedroom closet, had Michelle run the water, and I found a totally shattered pipe leading up to the shower. That was easy to Dremel out, and fix using stuff I bought at Lowes. I had Michelle run the water again, and listened for running water, hoping I wouldn’t hear any. Well, I did. The toilet was pouring water out of the back all over the floor.

“Shut the water off!”.

I couldn’t see the water leak so I decided to try to remove the toilet’s cover to inspect the plumbing. Sorry, no cover! I have to remove the entire toilet. Great. I started to remove the bolts holding the toilet down, and in order to access one of them, I had to hold down the lever that opens the flapper to the black water holding tank. I was dreading the smell, but was thankful that I didn’t smell much of anything. Good, right? Wrong. As I kept working on the toilet, unknown to me, there was something horrible happening. 

Like horrible monsters crawling out of the lowest pits of the earth, little, nasty, gross fly things were flying out of the toilet’s open drain hole. NOOOOO!!!!! I quickly shut the flap, but about six of these repulsive creatures had made it to the surface.

Disgusting! I smashed them with my bare hands, as they were not too fast (this is probably the first time they had seen light in their gross little lives). I can only surmise about the life cycle of these things, but I figure they live out their entire life cycles in the depths of the black water holding tank. Being born, eating(!), mating, and dying. All in the darkness, and grossness of the black water holding tank. Nasty.

I stuffed wads of paper towels into the drain hole, and finished removing the toilet. A couple more repulsive fly-things flew out, and were promptly crushed to death by my hands. I got the toilet removed, but at that point it was 9:45, and I couldn’t go buy the connectors I need to test the toilet, so I had to call it a night.

Hopefully I can find and fix the rest of the leaks tomorrow. I may come home from work early to make sure I can get the task finished. Even if I can’t “Get-R-Done” tomorrow, I can polish it off on Wednesday, because we aren’t going to be heading down to camp until Thursday.