In the article “I Am a Lucky Man!” I shared the beginnings of the plumbing replacement project. Having the water pipe from the main into the house fail convinced us to accelerate our plans to replace all of the old steel pipes in the house with new copper.

This article is to share the cascade effect of projects in an 85 year-old house, or why a broken water pipe resulted in our trimming the Pepper Tree.

Carrie had gotten into the rhythm of cutting and soldering copper pipes and didn’t want to stop until every pipe in the house had been replaced. However, while working under the house to replace the burst water pipe, Carrie realized she was less than enthusiastic about continuing to work in the crawl space with dangling and exposed electrical wires; especially considering the additional conductive hazards of moisture and metal pipes. The original 1920’s vintage tube and knob wiring isn’t too bad, but the Romex added in recent decades is scary with dangling junction boxes, missing wire nuts, and chattering breakers. Carrie started tracing circuits with the intent to turn off the most dangerous or at least the circuit serving the area in which she would be working, only to find that they had all been installed by someone apparently ignorant of the concept of grounding as evidenced by the fact that the occasional ground wire never found its way to ground.

Equally thankful and mystified that the house hadn’t burnt down we decided we would suspend plumbing work in order to first replace all of the electrical circuits. Part of that project was to request that Edison’s planning department approve a different route for the electrical feed from the pole to the house. The wire currently runs through the center of our big Pepper tree. Not only is this aesthetically undesirable, the tree limbs were pressing on the wire causing it to droop and pulling on the rooftop mast that connects the wire to the house. We hoped that Edison would agree to run the wire straight back from the house which would make it miss the tree. That solution was rejected by Edison as it would put the connection point to far from a pole. The good news is that they did agree that the new meter box could be installed next to the old one which will allow the migration from old to new to stage over a few weekends, rather than having to pull the old box off before installing the new one. The bad news is that they will not move the main feed from the old box to the new one until the tree limbs are out of the way.

So, this is how we got from a leaky pipe to tree trimming.
Leak begat plumbing project phase one.
Plumbing project phase one begat plumbing project phase two.
Plumbing project phase two begat electrical project.
Electrical project begat tree trimming project.
Tree trimming project will allow us to complete the electrical project, which in turn clears the way, and the hazards, for phase two of the plumbing project. Proof that the universe is truly a circle.

The Tree?
The tree trimming was its own ordeal. The Pepper tree is one of the reasons we bought this house. Its twin trunks form a heart shape as they first diverge and then turn in toward each other as they rise from their shared bole. I was anxious about what the tree would look like after trimming; afraid it would look hacked and wounded. Carrie did her best to prepare me for what she recognized would be trauma if the trimming went badly. She went so far as to schedule the job for a time I would be away from the house. We hired a company recommended by the arborist who saved our two big cypress trees, a company whose work we had seen in the neighborhood.
The tree came out great. No trauma. They removed more leaves than I expected, but the result is so symmetrical and the branches removed were done with such apparent deliberation that the detail revealed makes the tree somehow more tree-like.