I’ve shared in a few recent columns how I’m helping my son finish his basement. I’m having a great time building memories for the both of us. I made a sign from a scrap piece of drywall a few months ago: “Will Work for Food (Good Food).” I signed and dated it. I intend to have the sign framed and hope it hangs on the side wall of the speakeasy for decades. Fortunately, my son is a great cook, so I get paid very well.
One of the major challenges in this project is the full bathroom. The building drain exits the house about 4 inches above the concrete floor. A building drain is the main pipe that collects all the liquid and solid waste in your home and transports it to the city sewer or a septic tank.
I’ve been a master plumber for over four decades. I knew we had a few options to solve this conundrum. Many plumbers and remodelers choose to install a sewage ejector sump under the basement floor. The bathroom waste enters the sealed sump. A special grinder pump purees the waste and paper and forces it up about six feet into the elevated building drain. You have to break into the concrete slab to install a sealed sewage ejector sump. It’s very hard work.
Sewage ejector pits and pumps come with baggage. They require a separate atmospheric vent that supplies replacement air when the pump activates. Every gallon of water pumped out of the sump must be replaced immediately with a gallon of air. Failure to do this will create a vacuum within the sealed sump. This vacuum will begin to suck the new bathroom fixture traps dry in its frantic search for air.
The pumps in these sewage ejector pits have moving parts. I’m sure you know that everything with moving parts eventually fails. Switching out a pump in a pit filled with raw sewage is nasty work. Plumbers get paid a premium to do this. I didn’t want my son dealing with all these issues.
Another option is to install an above-ground macerating toilet. These operate just like the sewage ejector pits, but the entire setup sits above the concrete basement floor. A shower and sink can also drain into the small tank connected to the toilet. This system is much easier to install than the sewage ejector pump and pit. That said, the pump in the tank will also fail at some point, forcing you to deal with the sewage stew.
We were lucky because the building drain was so close to the floor. I did some math and discovered we could use gravity to drain this bathroom. The plumbing inspector was stunned when she showed up for the rough-piping inspection.
“Where is the sewage ejector pit?” she inquired.
“Dawn, I don’t need one,“ I said. ”I’ve decided to use a wall-mount toilet and put the shower up on a platform 7.5 inches off the floor.”
She shook her head acting as if she had never seen this setup before while she marked her inspection form PASSED.
The wall-mount toilet is easy to install. A sturdy steel frame is bolted between two wall studs. The weight of the toilet and a person sitting on it is supported by this frame. When the ceramic tile is on the wall, you’ll never know the frame is there. We designed this bathroom wall to be just four feet from where the building drain exits the house.
I solved the shower problem by building a custom-height treated lumber platform. The top of the platform sports a piece of 3/4-inch-thick treated plywood. This prevents wood rot should a leak develop in the future. Can you imagine how disruptive and expensive it would be to rebuild the platform years from now?
I had to craft a custom p-trap for the shower. I used two long-radius 2-inch-diameter 90s with the standard hard 90 that comes with a standard solid-weld p-trap. I used a shower drain fitting that uses a rubber bushing to make the leak-proof seal to the drain pipe. These are easy to install. Be sure to use silicone grease when installing the bushing.
An unfinished storage space allows us full access to the shower valve and drain, the toilet’s steel frame and the piping for the vanity sink. You should do the same if at all possible. You’ll never regret having easy access to all the plumbing in any bathroom. Decades ago architects put bedroom closets on the other side of bathrooms. Inside a closet it was common to have a removable access panel to the tub and shower plumbing.
