I posted earlier about the issue with getting a new toilet installed. That's taken care of ... but there's now another plumbing problem that my plumber and I are facing.
Our house, as you could probably gather from my post about the toilet, is very old. The pipes underneath the house are cast iron. There's a pipe that runs from our kitchen sink's drain down to a cast iron pipe in the basement (unfinished dirt basement) where I guess it runs to the main line.
There has been a leak around the place where the pipe from the sink drain connects to the pipe in the basement and water has been pouring from around it. It's not been an acute issue, because the placement of the pipe makes the water run right down into where our sump pump is at to remove any condensation, rain water, etc., that gets into the basement. So while the water around the pump may get a bit soapy (we're Luddites, don't have a dishwasher, still do 'em the old- fashioned way), it doesn't pool up because the pump pulls it out.
That was actually why I first contacted the plumber ... and it's taken a while because plumbers in my neck of the woods are kind of busy right now; people must be doing a lot of repairing instead of buying new stuff ... the toilet issue developed afterward. He inspected it and saw that the pipe was broken up at the top.
He came back today to take care of this issue (didn't get to do it yesterday since toilet was so problematic), went downstairs with his Sawzall with a cast-iron blade to try to cut out the offending piece of cast iron ... and the entire pipe broke. I'm not sure how extensive "broke" is, my wife was there, I've been at work and am typing this on a break, I'll see the damage when I get home.
The plumber is supposed to come back in a couple of days to try to fix the issue, he had other commitments that he could not break for this afternoon. As I said, it's not a horribly acute issue because none of the water was going into the pipe to the main line anyway, the break was so big, and everything is still going right into the sump pump to be pulled out.
I'm just wondering how big and complicated an issue fixing this will be.