About 3 years after I bought this place that I live at now, I got a whopping big water bill and a search revealed that the pipe to the house from the City water line ran diagonally under the recently laid new concrete driveway. Apparently the pipe wasn’t buried deeply enough and the weight of the slab poured above it cracked it.
Since I wasn’t going to rip out the driveway, I ran a new pipe alongside of it and connected it into the house water system, bypassing the old pipe. That was about 11 or 12 years ago and in the interim, I’ve had to shut off the valve at the street a dozen times to replace the toilet flush gadgets and a few sink faucets and so forth, and that City valve has started to leak. I needed to replace yet another toilet flush valve last week and couldn’t shut the water off fully, and had water all over the bathroom floor before I was able to complete the replacement.
Then yesterday, the old sink faucet in the other bathroom gave out and I wasn’t ready for another flooded bathroom, so I did what I should have done sooner. Went to the hardware store and bought a PVC plastic ball valve and a can of PVC glue, turned off the water as best it would go, cut the pipe and glued in the new valve. Fortunately, it held and now, when the new bathroom faucet arrives, I can take those pipes loose without the mess.
It’s a good thing I can do this stuff or I’d be constantly making some happy plumber’s new BMW payments every month, at the rate things keep falling apart around here.