Fixing the Plumbing

 I've been re-reading my posts anticipating some more time on my hands and realizing there are many stories to recount. I'm planning to retire in July this year (2021) after ALMOST 45 years at Southwestern Bell/SBC/AT&T and plan to add some more stories.  

Well, while walking down memory lane and reading my original posts from back when I started in 2010 (some of those are pretty good!) I realized I had not finished the promised stories.  After I Married a Dentist, Bees in the Bathroom, and the Waterbed story, I promised some others.  So this is the continuation of the saga of the Williams Ranch outside of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

If you'll recall, from past stories (say, some of those are really good!), my mom married a "dentist", Don Williams, who turned out to be a bootleg false teeth maker, operating out of an old farmhouse.  The reason for the location was that at the time only Oklahoma and Arizona allowed that kind of operation and even then, Broken Arrow didn't allow it in the city limits. Thus, just outside of town, on a dead end road by the airport outer marker, was the Williams Ranch.

It was a truly bachelor pad until my mom married Don and moved in.  She added some feminine touches but it was still what it was: a fire hazard with bees in the wall of the upper floor, overgrown out back making a good place to fling the trash bags, a cistern for water (hauled from town), and bad wiring and plumbing (the source of this story).  But the roof didn't leak-I don't think anyway.

Don in his denture making shop

So to the plumbing.  I'm sure the original plumbing was iron pipes and probably even done well. It lasted a long time.  Some had been upgraded. Like out in Don's shop in the garage.  It had a sink and a drain-that dumped into the back yard.  I'm sure it also had a septic tank and field and must have worked because when you flushed it went somewhere but no idea how long it had been since it was checked. 

So our story starts in the kitchen.  When we were visiting one day Don asked if I would help him with the sink faucet since it was so wobbly.  He had purchased a new set and wanted to replace it.  Now the kitchen had the original equipment and when I say original I mean ORIGINAL. The (probably) 1940's sink, porcelain covered steel, stove and maybe the first ever manufactured dishwasher-long since broke but a good storage spot.  Nothing ever upgraded.  So there was the problem.  The holes where the faucet stems went through the sink top has wollered out so much that you could pull them up out of the sink and made it really hard to use.

The Kitchen

So Don had a new set he was going to install but they would have had the same issue.  The holes were just too big.  I suggested we needed something to restore the smaller diameter but couldn't think of an answer other than to replace the sink.  Well that would cost money and wasn't going to happen (although Don always had ready cash and I wondered if he had stashes all over the yard).  So Don says, "Come with me" and off we went on a yard safari.

Now Don was a true Okie and I mean that in the most respectful way since all of my family, dad, mom, aunts, uncles, are Okies and very frugal, very resourceful. Having been raised where two bits was the difference between existing and starvation, bent nails were repurposed, lumber never went to waste, and you used what you had. In this case as we kicked around the yard we came to an old turkey roaster.  With the aid of a drill for the holes and some tin snips we had the makings of a new sink-top faucet mount.  We took it inside and with the help of a claw hammer to beat it into place got the new faucet mounted and working.  Voila!

The next project was the issue of the old pipes under the house that quit working.  Probably as mentioned old iron pipes that finally gave up the ghost.  Well I wasn't going under that house in the crawl space for sure and Don didn't think that was a good idea either-that part of Oklahoma being copperhead and rattlesnake territory and the fact no one had been under the house since Noah's flood.  But he had a simpler, and easier plan.  Plastic pipe.  Now I'm not opposed to plastic pipe and have long resorted to that easy method as opposed to sweating copper (These days I use PEX and will NEVER go back to plastic or copper!) so I said, "Great! How are we going to get from the kitchen (where it was working), through the bedroom, to the bathroom, where it was not working, without going outside or through the crawl space? Easy! Remember the aforementioned claw hammer? Seems the business end of the hammer makes a hole in the wall just the size of a 1/2" pipe (a little rough around the edges).

So...bash a hole under the sink into the bedroom and another one from the bedroom into the bathroom, grab a few elbows and a saw, and we proceeded to run around the bedroom baseboard and complete the job-sans glue.  I mentioned to Don that we were supposed to clean the joints and glue them.  He said friction would work. I suspected not but when he turned on the water it held. There may have been times he had to get up in the night and slap some glue on a joint but I was never told about it. 

I write this with a great fondness and respect for Don. He was a veteran and took good care of my mom, brother, niece and nephew, for many years.  He was a kind and resourceful man and even though he did things and lived differently than I would, he was a good man.

Don Wesley Williams (1917-2000)-a good man

And as far as I know, the plumbing was still working when they bulldozed the place after they moved up in the world-to a new trailer.