Solve The PVC Puzzle

I remember working under a house several years ago replacing the main iron drain line with PVC. This drain line was like a large misshapen spider with its legs running to all the toilets, sinks and showers. We measured every piece and carefully placed all the pieces only to find out that we started in the wrong place in the middle, causing all the rest of the pieces and angles to be off. This was very irritating, time consuming and cost me a little bit of money.
A couple years later in my career (I didn’t plumb unless I absolutely had to) I ran into another handyman that was more involved with plumbing than I was at the time. We worked on another large plumbing job in a beach front resort in Charleston. He cut all the pieces and dry fit the whole system before gluing it together. This sounds like the obvious solution – lets have a unanimous duh…I don’t know why I didn’t do this the last time I had a large job, I guess it had to do with being lucky for a long period of time. When the complete system was dry fit and in place he used another great idea for the job. He marked each joint on the plumbing with a sharpie marker so that when we started gluing the pipes together all the angles would be facing the correct direction (this is probably the most useful thing I learned from this job.
It has been several years since I have worked on any PVC plumbing requiring many joints and turns. I was looking under my sink and saw the sharpie marks I left when I re-plumed the PVC in the back of my house…I thought it might be a good thing to pass along…I used to do this stuff for a living and I didn’t think about it so I hope my sending out this post helps someone out. If this is already an obvious solution for your plumbing I hope you get this out of the post: You can learn many tricks and tips from someone else, don’t get into the spot where you know so much that you will not slow down to learn something new.

Thank you for reading,
Luke