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You know, sometimes I feel a little guilty about working on the house -- the destruction part. Houses built in 1939 have a lot more heft than houses built now. Replacing 2 1/4" mudded floors with plywood and 1/2" cement backer-board seems somehow wrong & disrepectful. And replacing galvanized steel and iron plumbing with plastic PVC seems to cheapen the house.

Well, I was thinking that before I cut open the drain from the tub. I'm replacing the tub plumbing to fix the slow drain problem we had with the tub. And here's why. Clogged arteries. Inside the drain, as you can see in the photo, is about a half inch of crud (all dried from not using the tub for some months now). This narrows the effective diameter of the pipe, resulting in -a decrease in bloodflow- a slow drain.

Older is not better if it doesn't work. It's easy to romanticize, but we don't mourn a lightbulb when it burns out. And like the old hefty cracked tile floor, the plumbing will benefit from the new materials -- however wrong and disprespectful they may be.

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