Bit by bit, I began removing these things. The gas pipe was relatively easy (not my first time, which helped). Turn off the main gas (outside at the meter), bleed the pressure off at the gas dryer valve, saw off the branch pipe near where it goes into the main line, then use a pipe wrench to unscrew it from the coupler, then install a plug. The water heater pilot light then needed relighting.
The big challenge was removing the washing machine drain pipe, which ran down into the concrete. It turns out the people who built the house poured the footings, foundation wall, and slab all at once (called a monolithic pour or slab). Doing it that way saves a lot of labor costs (associated with building and removing forms, and pouring concrete in three stages), but it uses a lot more concrete. Most of this extra concrete ends up around the periphery of the slab (the foundation walls are a lot thicker than they need to be in order to be as wide as the footings are required to be, and because there are no forms on the inside of the foundation walls—just dirt, and the dirt tends to slump and need digging out, and the resulting bigger hole filled with yet more concrete).
So when I starting hammering down through the concrete, I was dismayed not to find the 4" slab thickness I encountered in the bathroom (away from the outside of the slab).
After digging down a foot through solid concrete (and still not finding dirt), I gave up, cut off the drain pipe below the surface, and covered the hole with a piece of plywood and a scrap of carpet. With the drain/vent pipe gone, I could wheel the washing machine out (built a new dolly for that), and relocate my temporary sink to the new kitchen. Of course they would be useless without a water supply, so I ran some new temporary pex water lines.
I had capped and removed the old 3/4" copper pipes running to that part of the house, so I removed those SharkBite caps, and using push-on SharkBite reducing couplers, hooked up the 1/2" pex to the 3/4" copper. No soldering required.
Here is the temporary sink in its new location, with color-coded pex hot and cold water lines running down from the attic. The sink drains to the new drain pipe I had already run for the permanent kitchen sink. That drain pipe uses an air-admittance valve (the white thing at the top of the vertical black ABS drain) in place of a vent pipe running up through the roof. Not much water running through the sink drain. (At the other end of the drain line, there is a vent pipe that runs through the roof; it's just not real close to the sink. The air-admittance valve supplements that other vent stack.)
With the sink and washing machine out of the new laundry room, I had more room to work on getting rid of the rest of the stuff in the wall:
Most of the copper supply lines could simply be cut off and capped in the attic, but there was one cold water line that ran through this mess and fed the toilet in the adjacent bathroom, and also an outside faucet. There was an unused 1/2" copper cold water line in the attic; I connected a temporary 1/2" pex line to that (using a SharkBite coupler) which I ran down to the copper stub from the toilet and outside faucet. I made the connection with a plastic elbow (using Uponor ProPex expander system) and another SharkBite coupling. No soldering, very fast.
This morning I installed a reinforcing beam in the attic and removed the rest of the wall. So now I can continue unfettered hammering through the concrete slab. New drains for the guest bathroom sink, the washing machine, and two floor drains for the water softener backflush, and condensate from the future high-efficiency water heater and heat pump air handler.
Only that's not what I'm going to do next. My brother is visiting from the east coast in a couple of weeks. I'm going to prep for the new living room window, too big for me to lift by myself. I'm also going to try to build the floor-to-ceiling kitchen cabinets for the wall oven and adjacent microwave. The wall oven is too heavy/bulky for me to install by myself, so hopefully those cabinets will be finished by the time my brother arrives. The side benefit for doing that is that I will be able to start baking again (bread and pizza from scratch!).
Will it happen? Stay tuned.
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