If you saw my own house, you'd think I am a cowboy.
I don't make notches and holes in such a cavalier manner, but I have had to work around what is there and to reuse as much of the legacy notching as I can which doesn't make for the prettiest work, but it has meant I've never had to entirely replumb and rewire my house in one go from scratch.
Working around that disused pipe probably made sense. I have worked in a property before where there was a disused gas pipe which, when we started to check it was decommissioned in order to go about taking it out, it turned out it was still live and on the gas grid. Luckily I was working with a Registered Gas Installer who knew the regs well enough to point out to the national grid gas that the pipe had not been terminated correctly and that it 'seemed to be leaking' and in poor state and managed to persude them to actually decommission it properly so we could remove it. In the absense of clear visible evidence that the pipe was a dud dead, I would have treated it as live too, particularly if you hadn't been there. I'm sure you would have backed me up and paid the tab had it proved to be a live gas pipe, but some people would then say I was lacking in a duty of care to assume you were correct to say it wasn't in use: sometimes you just can't win.
I don't make notches and holes in such a cavalier manner, but I have had to work around what is there and to reuse as much of the legacy notching as I can which doesn't make for the prettiest work, but it has meant I've never had to entirely replumb and rewire my house in one go from scratch.
Working around that disused pipe probably made sense. I have worked in a property before where there was a disused gas pipe which, when we started to check it was decommissioned in order to go about taking it out, it turned out it was still live and on the gas grid. Luckily I was working with a Registered Gas Installer who knew the regs well enough to point out to the national grid gas that the pipe had not been terminated correctly and that it 'seemed to be leaking' and in poor state and managed to persude them to actually decommission it properly so we could remove it. In the absense of clear visible evidence that the pipe was a dud dead, I would have treated it as live too, particularly if you hadn't been there. I'm sure you would have backed me up and paid the tab had it proved to be a live gas pipe, but some people would then say I was lacking in a duty of care to assume you were correct to say it wasn't in use: sometimes you just can't win.