Once everything was out from under the house, we were left with a few relics. The return and supply ducts at the crawl space look a bit like the game Portals. All that rubble is just that–general rubble probably left after the house was originally constructed in 1967.
Here’s a shot of where those ducts terminated in a wooden frame box with extension ducts that the furnaces and compressors then sat atop. (See the last post about that craziness.) If we wanted a couple of wombats and offered them the old duct work as dens, we could have a use for them, but considering how destructive a full-grown wombat can be, leaving the metal ducts in place, encased in concrete, was the best option.
It was also pretty much impossible to pull out the vertical assemblies for the wall return vents, so they still exist in the crawl space and walls. More portals!
One thing we did not expect to find–and it was only thanks to one of the Ventwerx crew who alerted us–was this:
Yep, that is a sewer pipe. The one leading from the master bathroom shower and toilet to be exact. And yep, that’s a huge chunk along the top that has rusted out. Granted, the pipe is metal and original to the house, but when the previous owners wanted to sell this place, they went to Lowe’s and put down a chunk of money to have all four bathrooms and the kitchen remodeled–I’m pretty certain this would have been noticed by their contractors as it’s just a few feet away from the toilet drain. If the contractors were a reputable outfit, they would have certainly brought it to the attention of the previous owners, and if the contractors did bring it to their attention, they chose to do nothing, just like many other things here that the POs didn’t actually have to look at.
The guy who did the house inspection when we were in escrow failed to notice this, but we can cut him some slack since he wasn’t spending several hours under the house in that particular location, and there was a large duct blocking any view of the issue, but a duct was most certainly shifted to permit access to the new plumbing for the shower. We would have to wait to finish the furnace project before tackling the drain issue though, and there was one more gotcha waiting for us.