Update

Well! Long time no update. Sorry it's been so long...lots of stuff going on.

We've made quite a bit of progress over the last couple of weeks, thanks in big part to some great help.

So let's see...where were we. I suppose we left off with just getting the fixtures installed. That was a nice milestone...we had a working bathroom again.

Unfortunately, the long period of disuse took its toll... My wife and mother-in-law, after working for a few hours outside stripping old moulding, came inside to find the bathroom floor covered with water. Now what? I racked my brain trying to think whether I might have done something to cause a drainage backup. If you remember, I didn't do anything to the waste lines, other than remove the old tub trap and install a new one. Since that was at the END of one of the waste branches, I didn't think that could have done anything. The only thing I was able to come up with was possibly dropping a large piece of debris into the large toilet line during demolition before I covered it.

My wife and mother-in-law called a plumbing service who came by rather quickly. They were very nice and very helpful. The pulled the toilet off the flange in order to get the snake down into the waste pipes, but could not make a sharp turn in the pipes to reach the blockage. After a couple of hours, they gave up and left(they also "hand sculpted" the wax ring I had installed, as it was slightly too small and was allowing a little bit of moisture to seep).

The next day, my wife was out of town, so my Mother-in-law, Linda, was kind enough to take care of things in her absence. The second plumber tried the same thing and couldn't make the turn either, so he ended up digging a hole in the yard next to the existing "clean-out" so that he could just tap into the pipe underground. Eventually, he got there and pulled out a football-sized ball of roots. Argh... When he finished, he(finally!) put a clean-out pointing towards the house so that I can clean out the section that's been currently inaccessible. The root problems should be over.

So, after that delay, we're back in business. As I'd mentioned, Linda had been visiting us for a few weeks, helping my wife strip paint from the old moulding, and pitch in wherever she was needed. She worked hard! I'll continue in the next post.