The Dawn of the Dead (bathroom)

So rialian was upstairs taking a shower, and I heard the water falling through the pipes a little too clearly. At first I thought that was because the bathroom now has no walls, and whatever soundproofing was there had been removed. Still, it sounded suspiciously like water falling onto plastic, a sound one generally does not want to hear while someone is taking a shower.

Finally I decided to take a peek into the Zombie Bathroom, just to see if I could locate the pipes that were making that noise. I could see down to the crawl space because the rotten subflooring shown in the photo above has been removed. I soon saw that I wasn't hearing water in the pipes at all... I was hearing water emerging from a disconnected pipe and splashing onto the plastic vapor barrier that covers the gravel "floor" of the crawlspace.

Uh Oh.

We tested what would happen if we flushed the upstairs (still intact) toilet while it had just water in it, and sure enough, water emerged from the same disconnected pipe, which had once been connected to the erstwhile bathtub. So... Whilst I had my tub disconnected, the main line clogged today because of the yearly tree root invasion. It ordinarily would have backed up into the tub, except there wasn't any tub to back up into. Nonetheless, it did back into the tub pipe - and directly out of the tub pipe. This created a wondrous mess of shower water mixed with zombie bathroom debris that had fallen down into the crawlspace during the shedding of decayed parts. Luckily it only started this morning and I discovered it right away or it could have been much, much worse...

Meanwhile - earlier this week, the contractor discovered that for a very long time, the tub pipe had been cracked near the top and the seal had not been water tight for ages... So every time someone took a shower downstairs, it would deposit water into the crawlspace, creating a permanently moist breeding ground of crawling, betentacled globules of semi-sentient life.

Therefore, although this all sounds really horrible, I am exceedingly glad to have found out about it before someone fell through the floor. I would never be able to explain how my crawlspace is actually Sunken Ryleh, or why people keep disappearing...