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Jul. 24th, 2009 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSometimes I work too hard at my television. Television is not meant to be worked hard at. The last time I did this, I was whining about the depiction of drywall repair in Six Feet Under. This time, it's plumbing as shown in season 5 of House, episode Painless. In this episode, House's plumbing is shown having "pulled apart" in the ceiling above the bedroom. The plumber guy says that this is because of someone fucking with the shower. Anyway, my problem here is that this is not a realistic plumbing scenario on several fronts.
The location of the plumbing is stupid. I realize that the leak is above House's bedroom ceiling because it's more fun that way, but the ceiling above the bedroom is kind of distant from the bathroom. I'm not sure why the pipes are running in the ceiling, horizontally along an outside wall (where they can freeze), and then across the bedroom ceiling and down into the tub faucets. This doesn't make sense to me. House's apartment is on the first floor. The building probably has a basement/crawl space for the physical plant (furnace, water heaters, etc.) and therefore the pipes to his tub ought to run up through the floor rather than through the ceiling.
When the plumber guy goes up to look at the pipes, the pipes are not copper half-inch (common for plumbing) but instead are 1" or larger (they look like 1.25" to me) galvanized threaded pipe.
Galvanized water pipes are typically 3/4 or smaller -- we replaced one in the basement of 343 a couple of years ago. Galvanized drain lines are bigger diameter and pipes for heating systems are bigger diameter, but water supply lines tend to be smaller diameter. I think the pipes are as big as they are to look aesthetic rather than realistic.
Also, when the plumber is coming down from the ladder, we see that the hole in the ceiling is fucking round. It's almost perfectly round. I call bullshit.
No way would that ceiling have fallen down in a round way. The ceiling looks like 1/2" drywall. Drywall is put up in 4' wide sheets that are either 8' long or 12' long. When there is water above a drywall ceiling, it takes out a 4' wide sheet at a time. (I would be less pissy about this but I just HAD a second floor bathroom with a busted toilet water supply line that flooded the upstairs bathroom and took out the downstairs ceiling. I *know* how drywall ceiling failures from plumbing disasters work.) So maybe you're thinking that the plumber guy cut the round hole? No. It would not be made into a round hole by the plumber guy, either. The plumber guy totally would have made a fucking square hole. Seriously. Making square or triangular holes in drywall is like ten times easier than making round ones. Also it is about 1000 times easier to cut drywall into square or triangular pieces than it is to cut it into round pieces. NOBODY EVER PATCHES ROUND HOLES IN DRYWALL. EVER. If there happens to be a round hole in drywall (usually a fist punched through it) the FIRST STEP in fixing it is to make it into a square hole that can be back-braced and have a square piece of drywall cut to fit it. And so maybe the drywall couldn't fall down in a big sheet because of the stupid wood trim shit on the ceiling. Okay. But wet drywall sags like a bitch. There is no sagging going on with this hole. Unrealistic, say I.
And anyway, this should not be a drywall ceiling with nothing above it. It should be a plaster-n-lath ceiling or possibly a plaster-n-lath ceiling what has had drywall pieced and screwed up onto it to make it flatter and prettier. See, Hugh Laurie (the actor who does House) is a tall guy. Imdb says he's 6'2" but he can't reach the ceilings in his character's tv-land apartment.
If they were eight footers, he could. Totally. So, twelve foot ceilings. Also, lookit dat window dere, goes all but a foot from the ceiling with framing that goes all the way to the floor.
That is a window from when there was not sufficient indoor light. There's about a foot of depth on those window sills. I suspect that the windows were replaced with more rational-sized windows at some point in their history but the point remains that houses are not built like that anymore.
Edited to include further information: Apparently McMansions are built with fourteen foot ceilings and tall, floor-to-ceiling windows, something I did not know until![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
electroweak told me as much, in the comments below. Anyway, House's apartment or condo or whatever (He has homeowner's insurance so I'm not sure what the hell it is. Wilson calls it House's "apartment" but he has homeowner's insurance and is expected to pay for his own plumbing disasters.) is not a McMansion. House's place is one unit of a multi-family painted-grey brick dwelling located in the city, side-by-side-by-side with other buildings right up agin it. It fronts on the street. It's got zero front yard, has a couple of steps up from the sidewalk to the front door. (We get exterior shots of his digs in several episodes.)
This tv-land apartment of House's is in an old house with thick walls and twelve foot ceilings. It's from an era where you also got shitty wiring, elegant period wood trim (shown on the window and on the ceiling), big-ass cast iron radiators (we see one in the bathroom at the beginning of the show), and horsehair plaster and lath. There is no horsehair plaster and lath shown. I suppose it's POSSIBLE that someone gutted the entire building all the way to the joists and rafters and studs, carefully saving every bit of original woodwork, and rebuilt the building using drywall so that all the original woodwork could be replaced but damn. That'd be really expensive. Like OMG expensive. Maybe in a "rents to doctors" section of Princeton, this would be feasible. Maybe. But if you were tearing out all the walls back to the studs and joists and beams and shit, then why the fuck didn't you take that absolutely fantastic opportunity to replumb the building in half inch copper or PVC or that new PEX stuff?
Compounding the problems aforementioned, the plumber guy says that the pipes "pulled apart". It takes rather a lot of effort to "pull apart" threaded pipes. Like shitloads of effort. It's actually kind of difficult to "pull apart" copper pipe that's been sweated together. Threaded galvanized pipe with no signs of corrosion would be even harder to "pull apart". I guess you could do it, but it would take effort that would NOT be generated by House hanging on the damn shower thing to get into and out of the tub. The motion of the pipes generated by House getting into or out of the tub is a downward pull upon the visible shower diverter pipe. This goes down to the handles that control hot and cold and from thence to (respectively) the hot and cold water supply lines. We're only shown one "pulled apart" pipe but the hot and cold faucets connect to the hot and cold supply lines. Pipes do not stretch. How can one pull apart and not the other? Not getting it, there. Also, tub faucets are generally secured to a board bridged between two studs using those half-moon pipe securing brackets or possibly using pipe-hanging strips (the kinds with the holes in them). Tub faucets are not just allowed to fucking FLOAT because tenants beat up on tub faucets. Tub faucets need to be rigid -- that's why they are attached to studs. The odds of House being able to pull apart a pipe in a horizontal direction in another room by hanging onto the shower diverter pipe in a downward direction are just pretty fucking slim.
Now, it's possible that the person or persons who plumbed House's apartment were total lackwits who ran the plumbing in the most ass-hatted fashion ever, but even if they were, there would still be NO FUCKING WAY that a parted supply line would stop leaking until it was fixed or the water was shut off at the valve. When a supply line parts, it leaks until it is fixed. Water in supply pipes is under pressure and it comes out of the parted pipe just as fast as it comes out the spigot -- actually, it can come out faster than it comes out the spigot if you have one of those flow-reduction low gpm frakking aerators on the spigot. Therefore, when the water pours down on House's head at the outset of the plumbing problem, it should NOT taper off to mere drips (like it is shown doing) after a few seconds but should continue to pour down upon him as fast as a tub faucet runs when it's wide open. It is not shown so doing. (This is, again, for aesthetic reasons. When the water slows up, we get the nice reaction shot. If the water never slowed up, we could not see that. The man's got a great face -- I can see why they don't want to waste it.)
Finally, I thought that the plumber's estimate for fixing this issue seems a bit steep. His estimate is $2200.00. Even allowing for piecing the pipe and replacing the drywalll, I can't see how the plumber is getting to two grand. (Probably I should move to Princeton and do plumbing there.) If it cost me two grand every time I went to fix a busted pipe, my future in the landlord business would be short and unprofitable.
I'm probably overthinking this. But... y'know. No way. None.
The location of the plumbing is stupid. I realize that the leak is above House's bedroom ceiling because it's more fun that way, but the ceiling above the bedroom is kind of distant from the bathroom. I'm not sure why the pipes are running in the ceiling, horizontally along an outside wall (where they can freeze), and then across the bedroom ceiling and down into the tub faucets. This doesn't make sense to me. House's apartment is on the first floor. The building probably has a basement/crawl space for the physical plant (furnace, water heaters, etc.) and therefore the pipes to his tub ought to run up through the floor rather than through the ceiling.
When the plumber guy goes up to look at the pipes, the pipes are not copper half-inch (common for plumbing) but instead are 1" or larger (they look like 1.25" to me) galvanized threaded pipe.
Galvanized water pipes are typically 3/4 or smaller -- we replaced one in the basement of 343 a couple of years ago. Galvanized drain lines are bigger diameter and pipes for heating systems are bigger diameter, but water supply lines tend to be smaller diameter. I think the pipes are as big as they are to look aesthetic rather than realistic.
Also, when the plumber is coming down from the ladder, we see that the hole in the ceiling is fucking round. It's almost perfectly round. I call bullshit.
No way would that ceiling have fallen down in a round way. The ceiling looks like 1/2" drywall. Drywall is put up in 4' wide sheets that are either 8' long or 12' long. When there is water above a drywall ceiling, it takes out a 4' wide sheet at a time. (I would be less pissy about this but I just HAD a second floor bathroom with a busted toilet water supply line that flooded the upstairs bathroom and took out the downstairs ceiling. I *know* how drywall ceiling failures from plumbing disasters work.) So maybe you're thinking that the plumber guy cut the round hole? No. It would not be made into a round hole by the plumber guy, either. The plumber guy totally would have made a fucking square hole. Seriously. Making square or triangular holes in drywall is like ten times easier than making round ones. Also it is about 1000 times easier to cut drywall into square or triangular pieces than it is to cut it into round pieces. NOBODY EVER PATCHES ROUND HOLES IN DRYWALL. EVER. If there happens to be a round hole in drywall (usually a fist punched through it) the FIRST STEP in fixing it is to make it into a square hole that can be back-braced and have a square piece of drywall cut to fit it. And so maybe the drywall couldn't fall down in a big sheet because of the stupid wood trim shit on the ceiling. Okay. But wet drywall sags like a bitch. There is no sagging going on with this hole. Unrealistic, say I.
And anyway, this should not be a drywall ceiling with nothing above it. It should be a plaster-n-lath ceiling or possibly a plaster-n-lath ceiling what has had drywall pieced and screwed up onto it to make it flatter and prettier. See, Hugh Laurie (the actor who does House) is a tall guy. Imdb says he's 6'2" but he can't reach the ceilings in his character's tv-land apartment.
If they were eight footers, he could. Totally. So, twelve foot ceilings. Also, lookit dat window dere, goes all but a foot from the ceiling with framing that goes all the way to the floor.
That is a window from when there was not sufficient indoor light. There's about a foot of depth on those window sills. I suspect that the windows were replaced with more rational-sized windows at some point in their history but the point remains that houses are not built like that anymore.
Edited to include further information: Apparently McMansions are built with fourteen foot ceilings and tall, floor-to-ceiling windows, something I did not know until
electroweak told me as much, in the comments below. Anyway, House's apartment or condo or whatever (He has homeowner's insurance so I'm not sure what the hell it is. Wilson calls it House's "apartment" but he has homeowner's insurance and is expected to pay for his own plumbing disasters.) is not a McMansion. House's place is one unit of a multi-family painted-grey brick dwelling located in the city, side-by-side-by-side with other buildings right up agin it. It fronts on the street. It's got zero front yard, has a couple of steps up from the sidewalk to the front door. (We get exterior shots of his digs in several episodes.) This tv-land apartment of House's is in an old house with thick walls and twelve foot ceilings. It's from an era where you also got shitty wiring, elegant period wood trim (shown on the window and on the ceiling), big-ass cast iron radiators (we see one in the bathroom at the beginning of the show), and horsehair plaster and lath. There is no horsehair plaster and lath shown. I suppose it's POSSIBLE that someone gutted the entire building all the way to the joists and rafters and studs, carefully saving every bit of original woodwork, and rebuilt the building using drywall so that all the original woodwork could be replaced but damn. That'd be really expensive. Like OMG expensive. Maybe in a "rents to doctors" section of Princeton, this would be feasible. Maybe. But if you were tearing out all the walls back to the studs and joists and beams and shit, then why the fuck didn't you take that absolutely fantastic opportunity to replumb the building in half inch copper or PVC or that new PEX stuff?
Compounding the problems aforementioned, the plumber guy says that the pipes "pulled apart". It takes rather a lot of effort to "pull apart" threaded pipes. Like shitloads of effort. It's actually kind of difficult to "pull apart" copper pipe that's been sweated together. Threaded galvanized pipe with no signs of corrosion would be even harder to "pull apart". I guess you could do it, but it would take effort that would NOT be generated by House hanging on the damn shower thing to get into and out of the tub. The motion of the pipes generated by House getting into or out of the tub is a downward pull upon the visible shower diverter pipe. This goes down to the handles that control hot and cold and from thence to (respectively) the hot and cold water supply lines. We're only shown one "pulled apart" pipe but the hot and cold faucets connect to the hot and cold supply lines. Pipes do not stretch. How can one pull apart and not the other? Not getting it, there. Also, tub faucets are generally secured to a board bridged between two studs using those half-moon pipe securing brackets or possibly using pipe-hanging strips (the kinds with the holes in them). Tub faucets are not just allowed to fucking FLOAT because tenants beat up on tub faucets. Tub faucets need to be rigid -- that's why they are attached to studs. The odds of House being able to pull apart a pipe in a horizontal direction in another room by hanging onto the shower diverter pipe in a downward direction are just pretty fucking slim.
Now, it's possible that the person or persons who plumbed House's apartment were total lackwits who ran the plumbing in the most ass-hatted fashion ever, but even if they were, there would still be NO FUCKING WAY that a parted supply line would stop leaking until it was fixed or the water was shut off at the valve. When a supply line parts, it leaks until it is fixed. Water in supply pipes is under pressure and it comes out of the parted pipe just as fast as it comes out the spigot -- actually, it can come out faster than it comes out the spigot if you have one of those flow-reduction low gpm frakking aerators on the spigot. Therefore, when the water pours down on House's head at the outset of the plumbing problem, it should NOT taper off to mere drips (like it is shown doing) after a few seconds but should continue to pour down upon him as fast as a tub faucet runs when it's wide open. It is not shown so doing. (This is, again, for aesthetic reasons. When the water slows up, we get the nice reaction shot. If the water never slowed up, we could not see that. The man's got a great face -- I can see why they don't want to waste it.)
Finally, I thought that the plumber's estimate for fixing this issue seems a bit steep. His estimate is $2200.00. Even allowing for piecing the pipe and replacing the drywalll, I can't see how the plumber is getting to two grand. (Probably I should move to Princeton and do plumbing there.) If it cost me two grand every time I went to fix a busted pipe, my future in the landlord business would be short and unprofitable.
I'm probably overthinking this. But... y'know. No way. None.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-25 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-25 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-25 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-25 03:29 pm (UTC)I saw somebody mention online that the House actor was the same as the Wooster actor in Jeeves and Wooster. This is a trip and makes me want to see the series more than ever.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-25 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-25 09:59 pm (UTC)McMansions are. My parents have tall windows like that in their built-in-2002-with-fourteen-foot-ceilings house (sans the foot of depth, since that's an artifact of stone walls).
no subject
Date: 2009-07-25 10:39 pm (UTC)