Help! We are very experienced DIYers creating a master en-suite but have hit a “boulder in the road” on the rough in plumbing.
The room we are doing this in has a crawl space and no existing plumbing.
the adjacent room has a concrete slab and adjacent to that room is an original basement with block walls. The main water and sewer lines are in the basement.
So we have to run the rough in’s for the new bathroom from the basement and under the concrete slab to the crawl space!
Problem… under the slab they used huge pieces of old concrete sidewalks with gravel on top as filler . Standing down In the basement we have been able to dig out a tunnel of about 10 feet in length about 16” diameter of debris with a garden hoe and 1” copper pipe, 1 tbls at a time! but have reached our capacity and my patience’s with still about 10 feet to go. This must be what chiseling out of prison feels like. The concrete chunks are large and we are tired. We remove a rock and keep thinking we are almost done only to find another rock 5” behind it! I suppose out only option now is to reroute outside the house or bust through the slab from above which would mean demolishing a family room with new flooring.
Does anyone have a creative solution? Right now dynamite sounds good! This is holding up the whole project.
The room we are doing this in has a crawl space and no existing plumbing.
the adjacent room has a concrete slab and adjacent to that room is an original basement with block walls. The main water and sewer lines are in the basement.
So we have to run the rough in’s for the new bathroom from the basement and under the concrete slab to the crawl space!
Problem… under the slab they used huge pieces of old concrete sidewalks with gravel on top as filler . Standing down In the basement we have been able to dig out a tunnel of about 10 feet in length about 16” diameter of debris with a garden hoe and 1” copper pipe, 1 tbls at a time! but have reached our capacity and my patience’s with still about 10 feet to go. This must be what chiseling out of prison feels like. The concrete chunks are large and we are tired. We remove a rock and keep thinking we are almost done only to find another rock 5” behind it! I suppose out only option now is to reroute outside the house or bust through the slab from above which would mean demolishing a family room with new flooring.
Does anyone have a creative solution? Right now dynamite sounds good! This is holding up the whole project.
