The Saga of the Mysterious Blue Pipe

We moved into our Dream Home in November of 2010.  Built in 1945, it was a place with character, personality, and a myriad of bizarre quirks left to us by the previous owners.  I could go on and on about the strange row of large nails hammered into the wall, the weird drop-down ceiling that I suppose they thought was an essential part of any early 1980s remodel attempt, the fake rock wall in the bathroom, or even the hook and eye locks on the *inside* of the closets.  Today, though, we're going to delve into the mystery of the Blue Pipe.

 

 

Mysterious blue pipe hung down one corner of an upstairs room, jutting down from the ceiling like a bad idea.  It hung the entire distance from ceiling to floor, and to hide it, someone with an overabundance of moxie painted it blue like the walls.  It had no cap on the end, just it's bare pipe threads waiting for something to come along and be reattached.

Where did it go?  What did it do?

Investigation in the attic yielded no answers.  The attic directly above this corner of the room was smooth floor (also painted blue - but a soothing "prison blueish gray"). 

In 2010, as we were moving in, we thought, "Huh.  We should probably do something about that."  And then we moved on.  Everything about trying to get this house purchased had seemed so needlessly hard that the thought of trying to overcome the mysterious blue pipe conjured (at least in my head) images of steel saws, blow torches, and people wearing welding masks.  I envisioned having to turn off the electricity, water, AND the gas just to try to figure out what to do about this pipe. I was certain we'd have to "call somebody" about it.

So we ignored it for two years.

Fast forward to this very day.  A day that will live in infamy greater than any day that Velma pulled the mask of some farmer as she exclaimed "Jenkies!"  In our slow refurbishing crawl of the house, we've come to this room and back to this corner.  With the Mysterious Blue Pipe.

We stood and looked at it a while.  Banged it with a hammer.  The we said to ourselves, "Well, we may as well pry up the floor in the attic and see where it goes."

I stayed in the room as my husband tromped up the stairs because it was my job to smack the pipe up into the ceiling so he could get a read on where exactly to pry into the floor.

"Okay!"
Smack, smack, smack.
Silence.
Smack, smack, smack.
Pause.
Smack, sm...
"Hey!  That's enough."

Lo and Behold!  There was a panel in the floor that came up with relative ease.  Wonder of wonders.  The pipe went...nowhere.  It fastened into another elbow joint and continued on to who knows where under the floor.

Recall that this pipe wasn't capped at it's terminal end, so it wasn't connected to any live utility (water, gas, blue ethereal goo).

Back downstairs, we both stared at it for a minute and my husband said, "What if we just unscrewed this piece?"  So he went to the basement and collected a pipe wrench, fitted it onto the pipe, and then came my only other contribution to this endeavor (besides the ceiling smacking)...
"Lefty loosey"
Turn, turn, turnturnturn...
And the pipe unfastened and slid down out of the ceiling.

Years of Mystery.  Solved in approximately 30 seconds.

 

And now, time for caulk and a plaster patch.

 

Update Edit:

 

Patching process begun!

 

That patch is from a single hole wall patch kit available at Home Depot.  I think it was about 4 bucks, and it has the plate, the mesh, and a handy sticky backing to apply it to the wall.  Just sand, stick, then let it dry and start spackling over it!  Easy Peasy.

 

 

Coat one of the spackle!  Also I managed to get the whole top of the room taped off to paint the moulding!  WooHoo!