Before the room can be plastered next week, the original plumbing that previously served the kitchen sink & appliances needed to be removed – paving the way for a cleanly filled & plastered wall.

Unfortunately, as you can see the pipework disappears off under the floor somewhere and at the moment we have no idea where it links up with the rest of the house’s plumbing… and don’t particularly relish the prospect of lifting most of our upstairs floorboards to trace everything back.

As a compromise we opted to dig out the area immediately around the pipes and cap them off just underneath floor level.

First step was to drain & remove the exposed pipework leaving the two vertical risers.

As we didn’t know which direction the pipes actually ran under the floor, out came our tried & tested stud/cable/pipe/joist detector (Bosch DMF 10) and after a little tracing we’d determined that both pipes ran parallel to the wall for a reasonable distance so without further ado we started on digging up enough of the floor screed to reveal the pipes & give us enough room to cap them off.

A fair amount of digging & chipping later, both pipes have been revealed and the cold pipe capped off with a compression stop-end on the basis that attempting to solder a cap onto the wet & corroded copper didn’t really seem like a great idea.

One compression stop-end ready for use…

The end result… hot & cold pipework capped off and ready for testing….

Remnants of the floor screed…

Post-clean-up.

Once the area has fully dried out we’ll refill with some concrete & self-levelling compound to bring the hole back up to match the rest of the floor.

We’re going to be laying laminate floor in this room to match the lounge and hall so it doesn’t matter if the resulting floor isn’t 100% level.

The final result looks something like this… bring on the plasterer tomorrow!