Can't Take the Sky From Me

And it works too!

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 02:25:00 +0000

I am a Rock

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:25:00 +0000

I am an Island.

Let there be light

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:05:00 +0000

And it was Good.

Piano Room (New House Top Ten)

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 04:00:00 +0000

This is the second of ten in a series of the Top Ten things I am most looking forward to in our new House.

The Piano Room is a 14x15 room just to left of our front entrance. Now, some people may simply call this a Living Room, or a Den, or whatever -- but we have included this room in our design specifically to hold a Piano -- and not just any random piano, but a 1909 Steinway Baby Grand.

My father-in-law has been in possession of a family heirloom piano -- and told us quite some time ago, that once we have room for the piano, we are welcome to have it. Now we may not be able to acquire it right away -- it will definitely require some professional piano movers, and since it has not been actively played for several years, it will probably need some rehabilitation.

So, I guess, it is the Piano itself I am looking forward to, not necessarily the Room, but the Room represents the necessary space for being able to accept this beautiful instrument into our family.

Aspirations 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:19:00 +0000

So, its time for another year, and another set of resolutions. Some will be carried over from last year -- since I failed in 2010, better make another stab at them this year.

Still Blogged Down: So, last year, I had set a goal to write a post at least once a week. I knew early on in the year, that I wasn't going to achieve that, but I kept thinking that I was way ahead of my 2009 pace. But when I went to Grade myself on this Resolution, I discovered that I had only gone from 24 posts in 2009 to 28 posts in 2010. So, this one is being carried over to 2011 -- To write at least one blog post per week.

Speed 2: The time and energy I spent on the new House has kept me from doing much running in 2010, so I am pretty much carrying over all my running goals to 2011:
- Qualify for the top-seeded starting group for the 500 mini-marathon: I have qualified for the second group (Coral B) two years in a row, still trying to get into A.
- Complete at least 3 Half-Marathons and at least 4 full Marathons
- Run a Half-Marathon in under 90 minutes: My personal best is still the year I ran the 2009 500 mini in 96 minutes, but my pace basically got slower and slower throughout 2010
- Run a full Marathon in under 3.5 hours: I actually haven't quite managed to break the 4 hours block yet (best time was 4 hours and 21 seconds).
Sorting Hat: Time to get organized. I actually started trying to type an explanation of why and what needs to be organized, but realized that will likely be an entire blog post unto itself (perhaps even a series of posts). Suffice it to say that all things, physical and digital, will have their place, and be accessible without disorganizing something else.

In case you're actually comparing this with Last Year's goals, you'll notice a couple of other failed 2010 resolutions that I have decided not to carry over. First was our new Home -- Since we did actually get a good start on the new house, and we're only a couple months away from completion, although I can't consider it a complete success for 2010, it would probably be a bit cheating to make it a goal for 2011, since so much of the work is already done. Secondly, I had a goal of keeping us under our medical deductible for 2010. Not only did this not occur, but there is a 90% chance that Christopher is going to need another procedure late this spring (probably once the school year is complete), which will include an average 5 day post-op recovery in the hospital. That alone will probably blow our deductible this year -- so I am not even going to attempt to stress over that this year.

Aspirations 2010 Report Card

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 03:20:00 +0000

Back in January, I posted my Resolutions. For the details on what each Goal was, see the original post. This is where I grade myself on how well I did. I almost hate to post this, because its going to make for a lousy report card, but here it is.

Blogged Down: Well, I haven't even come close to posting once a week, having had several multi-week gaps between posts. I have posted 28 posts this year, giving me an average of 0.54 posts per week. I especially slacked on including technology-centric posts. And this only represented a slight increase from 2009.
Grade: D

On the House: Well, financing was a challenge in itself, but we did finally get a construction loan this summer, and were able to break ground in late August. We haven't finished yet, in fact we're still at least another 6-8 weeks away from being done. But looking at the wording of this Goal in the original post, I didn't actually state that we would finish the new house this year, so I can't call this a big failure.
Grade: B

Health Nuts: Well, up until this Autumn, we were on pace to stay under our medical deductible this year, then Christopher had some setbacks that resulted in a couple of ER visits, a brief stay in the hospital, and a procedure, and that was pretty much the end of the deductible.
Grade: F

Ramming Speed: As work began on the house, the amount of time (and energy) I had available to Run continued to diminish, so I fell short of all of my running goals --
Seeding: Still stuck in level 2.
3 Halves and 4 Fulls: Ran the IU Circle of Life Half Marathon, 500 festival Mini-Marathon, the Geist Half Marathon, and the Sunburst Marathon this spring, but only ran the Monumental Half Marathon this Fall. Making for a total of 4 Halves, but only 1 Full this year.
Half under 90: No joy here. All my times in 2010 got continually slower as the year progressed. My personal best, from 2009, still stands at just under 96 minutes.
Full under 3.5: I only ran the one Full marathon this year, and wasn't really in shape for it -- took me almost 5 hours.
Grade: D

Overall Grade: D

Plumb Start

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 03:39:00 +0000

Well, I am still working on HVAC, but the plumbers finally got started.

The trick is to keep the house warm enough long enough for the pipe solvent (glue) to cure. Once they get all the drain lines, the supply lines should be fairly easy.

Mighty Mighty

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:41:00 +0000

It's a Brick. House.

Between the craziness of the holidays, children in the hospital, and trying to squeeze in a little work on the inside of the new house, I haven't gotten around to writing about the exterior brick work that was complete a couple of weeks ago.

Special Delivery October 20: BRICKS!

October 21, Alexander Masonry began laying the first bricks for our house wrap, and had completed the rear of the garage by the end of the first day.

In less than a week, they had finished the entire back of the house.

About this time, Ernie tells me he is a little concerned that the front of the house might look at little too monotonous, since our house is so wide (huge), that's a lot of brick. He described a little pattern he could make around the windows and the doors to break of the monotony. After Cathy and I discuss is, we tell him to go ahead. The next day, he says he has several limestone blocks from a demolition they did this Spring. Since they've become hazards in his yard for kids playing around, he was going to just get rid of them, but then it occurred to him that they might look good strategically placed at the corners of our windows and doors. Since he was going to throw them out, he wouldn't charge us for the limestone.

I think the limestone accents turned out great (and you can't beat Free). They used our leftover roofing felt to spread out on the front porch to protect it while they worked.

About two and a half weeks from the start, they had finished the entire brickwork and cleaned up.

Ernie's crew did a beautiful job, and did it very efficiently. The entire house is wrapped in brick and ready to be trimmed, now for the much slower process of finishing the interior.

Dried In

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Today, we officially reached the "dry-in" stage of construction. With walls, windows, doors, and shingles, we are now mostly protected from the elements.

And yes, those are pallets of bricks in the picture on the right -- our brick-mason starts tomorrow!

And for the first time, we can actually do dome parallel work on the house. Up until now, everything has been sequential (i.e. first they dig a hole, then they pour a basement, then they frame the house, then they put on a roof, etc.). Now as the brick-mason spends a few weeks getting our house all nice and wrapped, we can simultaneously start working on interior rough work -- hvac, plumbing, electric.

Yard (New House Top Ten)

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 02:00:00 +0000

This is the first of ten in a series of the Top Ten things I am most looking forward to in our new House.

The Yard is listed as number one, because this is really the Straw.
All the other things listed in the Top Ten are grand luxuries that we are eagerly anticipating -- but ones we would likely be very tempted to live without if there wasn't an underlying motivational factor for us to move -- and that is the Yard.

Our current property is only 0.18 acres, giving us a back yard of less than 2800 square feet. But it's not really (or not entirely) the size that is the problem -- we certainly lived in homes with smaller. The entire back yard is graded downhill from the back of the house to the water retention pond that is about 40 feet from our back door. Now compound that with the fact that, up until a month ago, our Neighborhood covenents prohibited erecting fences on properties that are adjacent to the retention pond, and that means that the least safest place for our kids to play is right in our own backyard.

If you tripped over the threshold as you walked out the back door, you would likely end up tumbling all the way into the pond. How many people can say that their own back yard is the last place they would let their kids play unattended? I wonder, if the covenants had changed to allow this before we embarked on construction, would we still have done it?

Our new property is over half an acre. After we build our new house 40 feet off the road, our new back yard will be large enough that it could house our entire existing .18 acre property twice, with room to spare. And it is flat. All the way back. We'll actually be able to let the kids play outside -- maybe even (gasp) unsupervised.

Top 10 Features of the New House

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:17:00 +0000

Quite a few people have asked what our favorite feature, or what we're most looking forward to in our new house. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I can't narrow it down to just one. We are, after all, building our dream house. Below is the top ten list of the Features I am most looking forward to in the new house. Each one of these will probably warrant its own blog post, so I'll update this list to link to each individual post as it is created.

Yard

Piano Room

Kitchen and Pantry

Garage

Mud Room

Master Closet Space

Master Bath

Foyer and Loft

Front Porch

Basement

The Great Frame Up

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 01:46:00 +0000

They started our framing on Sept. 22 -- and officially finished yesterday, Oct 8. They originally estimated 6-7 working days -- it ended up being 10 working days, but they were spread across 16 real days. Still, not bad to go from bare concrete to fully framed in just over 2 weeks.

They had all the walls, internal and external, first and second floors, done in about 5 working days.

But then came the roof. Setting roof trusses took a day, then the roof sheathing, then they had to stick frame the covered porch roof.

And then yesterday, they completed their final "punch list". Monday, Benchmark Remodeling starts in with our window and door installations.

Classic Truss has done a fine job with the project -- from turning our design into engineered drawings, then a framing package, and assembling it all. My biggest frustrations with them have been a lack of communication. Sometimes, this lack of communication has caused a bit of stress, and leading me to believe there were big problems. For example, they needed 3 weeks lead time before they could be on site to start framing. When our foundation crew started work, I called Classic Truss to give them that 3 weeks notice, but no one ever returned my phone messages or email messages -- I bugged them for a week and half with no response, thinking the whole time that there was either some big problem, or they weren't going to be able to get me in their schedule, but then, I finally got ahold of the business manager who said, "oh, yeah, we got your first message over a week ago, and put you in our queue and have started the pre-assembly. We could probably be onsite early next week". Which was actually Earlier than I needed them -- but if I had just gotten a simple phone call, there would have been much less stress. These same kinds of incidents happened throughout the framing, when I would call either the business manager or crew supervisor because of some small issue I discovered, they would often take days to respond, leading me to catastrophize that they would refuse to fix it, but inevitably, they would already be taking care of the problem by the time they called back. In all, I am very happy with their work -- my only complaint is their lack of responsive communication.

"Special" Delivery

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 02:34:00 +0000

*my mobile phone rings*
Me: Hello, this is Eric.
Cindy: Hello, this is Cindy from Lowe's. I am calling about your delivery order.
Me: Yes?
Cindy: Yes, we have pulled your order and have scheduled to deliver your doors and windows to you tomorrow between noon and 2pm.
Me: That sounds good.
Cindy: Will you have someone available to accept the delivery?
Me: Um, well, probably not, can you just leave everything inside the garage?
Cindy: Well, we can place everything in the garage, but we would need to have someone there to let us in.
Me: Um, the garage doors are part of your delivery.
Cindy: Yes?
Me: So, there are no doors on the garage yet.
Cindy: Yes?
Me: So, you can just leave everything, including the doors, in the garage.
Cindy: But we would need someone there to let .... Oh, right.

At least the delivery actually made it to its destination.

Let the Frames Begin

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Monday was backfill day ... Tuesday was delivery day.
We were expecting the framing package to arrive on Tuesday, just not so early. I was out for my morning run, passing by our lot around 6:30 am, and the trucks were parked there already. The lead driver said they were just waiting for daylight before trying to back into the lot and unload.

I finished my run, heading home, grabbed the camera, and drove back to the lot. By the time I got there, they were just about finished unloading.

This morning, they got started building, beginning with the load bearing wall in the basement. Most of the walls are pre-assembled in segments at their facility, but the walls in the basement are being traditionally stick built. The supervisor called me about mid-day to let me know that it was raining pretty hard, and they were going to have to break for the day. Apparently, though, the crew returned after the rain let up this afternoon, and worked until 7pm. They got all the trusses and sheeting for the first floor on.

We have a Floor!

Slabbed

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:15:00 +0000

Well, they started two days later than we had planned, but Friday, they brought out the pump truck and started pouring slabs.

We effectively have three separate slabs -- the basement floor, the garage floor, and the front porch. They decided to do only two of the three at this point.

They decided that the front porch slab would be best if poured after the framers have the first flooring system installed. I'm not sure how that's going to work with gettin my loan draw for foundation work, and squeezing in the slab pour while the framers are on site, but they assure me this is will result in the best quality porch.

This should prove to be an interesting and fast paced week for our new home.

Laying Pipes

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 01:12:00 +0000

This past week was a foray into Under Slab Plumbing. The point of this project is to "pre-plumb" our basement so that we can later (probably at least a couple of years later) include plubming fixtures in a basement finishing project. I had to run pipe for drains and vents for a full bathroom on one side of the basement, a half bath near the middle, a furnace drain on the other side, and a stub for a wetbar. This was far and away the largest plumbing project I have ever tackled myself.

First problem I discovered on Saturday, was that our gravelled basement floor was wet. So wet, that every footstep filled with water. This made it difficult just to get around down there, and very difficult to accomplish any digging. I installed a sump pump in one of the pits, but had no power so it didn't really accomplish anything.

Sunday morning, as soon as I thought it late enough not to wake anyone, I called my neighbors to ask permission to use their external power outlet for my sump pump. The graciously "loaned" me their power. Within a couple hours of plugging the pump in, the basement floor was dry, and I started once again trenching for our pipes. My father came over to assist, and we switched gears from trenching to digging the hole for the ejector pit.

For those unfamiliar with an ejector, this is what makes sewage go Up. Normally, in the part of the house that sits above ground, all your drains, toilets, sinks, etc. gradually slope to a central sewage pipe, which gradually slopes to the main sewage line running by your house (or slopes to your septic system). Everything flows simply because it goes downhill -- pulled by gravity. But if you have plumbing in the basement -- or other "below grade" location, something has to push that sewage back Up.

The pit basin is nearly identical to a sump pit basin -- in fact, some basin models can be used for either purpose. The big difference is that once connected, the ejector must have a sealed lid, and a pipe that pumps to your sewer line, whereas a sump pump pit typically has a loose fitting lid, and pumps water to a storm drain, or maybe just into your backyard.

The ejector pit basin is 30 inches deep. Digging into the hard pan of our basement floor for our trenches had been difficult, but trying to dig 30 inches deep was like chiseling through rock. For the last 10 inches or so, we were literally taking our shovels and chiseling at the bottom of the pit, because we couldn't actually dig into it. That took us most of the day.

Unfortunately, that ate up our Sunday, and there was still much work to do. So, Monday, I took a personal day from work, and continued trenching, and eventually started laying the drain pipes. While this work was not nearly as frustrating as digging the ejector pit, it was certainly slow work for a single worker. Once again, I ran out of time, and had to call it quits with still a little work to do.

The county inspector was scheduled to come on Tuesday, so I got up at 5 o'clock to finish the work. I completed the last couple runs, then put stub pipes on everything (so they would stick out of the slab once it was poured. Ended up being pretty late to work that day -- but the good news is that my work was approved by the county building inspector.

The pipes had to stay exposed for the inspection, but with the slabs scheduled to be poured on Wednesday, I once again got up at 5 to go backfill dirt and gravel over the pipes. You can imagine my frustration when I discovered that my slab subcontractor had been waiting on a confirmation call for me, and never arrived to pour concrete. But I was ready!

Certified Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:50:00 +0000

Yesterday, they pulled the forms off the short walls, and brought out the county inspector for the official Foundation Inspection -- and we Passed! Apparently, in order to appropriately inspect, the inspection has to occur before any backfilling or any poured slabs are in place -- so there are still several days worth of work to go before we entirely foundation-complete, including a separate inspection for the basement-under-slab-plumbing once it is in place.

In the right-hand picture, on the corner by the frontmost garage door, you can see the green tag of approval from the county inspector.

Form-henge

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:40:00 +0000

Yesterday, they poured the footers for the "short" foundation walls, i.e. for the front porch and the garage. They didn't get much further today, simply delivering the forms for said walls to the lot. Here is the current state of the lot:

Green Walls

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:35:00 +0000

This morning, Cathy awoke with a fever, and her back was still giving her troubles. So I had to call in to work and take the day off to watch the kids. This meant that my morning run was a bit later that usual, and when I ran by our lot about 8, the crew was already there pulling the Forms off.
When my wife headed to the doctor, I decided to take the boys for haircuts, and of course drive the lot with the camera. Just in time, because they had already departed with the forms, and a two-man crew was getting set up to start applying the exterior waterproofing (RubRWall) -- which was a sprayable green goo. I managed to snap a couple of bare concrete pictures.

This evening we checked back to find that they had completed the waterproofing, and placed the "waterproofing protection board" up. On the right hand wall, which will be the shared wall between the house and the garage, you can see the green goop extending a few inches above the board. The couple of feet of non-waterproofed wall that you see will be the interior foundation wall of the garage.

This is the view looking down through the window well into the basement.

Here you can see the goo on the brick ledge on the top of the outside wall.

There is a chance of rain tomorrow, so I don't know how that will affect progress, but if it doesn't hamper their work, we should get footings for the garage and front porch.

Basement Walls

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:21:00 +0000

Monday, they had planned to Set and Pour the basement walls, but apparently it took them a bit longer to Set the forms for our huge basement.

So at the end of the day, we just had a completed set of empty Forms -- Ready for concrete.

But this morning they showed up ready to pour. They needed the pump truck with the boom to reach the far end.

So by noon, our basement walls were poured and starting to cure. We have basement walls!

Meanwhile, I still haven't got a committed start date from our framers yet -- getting a little worried that our foundation will be completed and sitting there for a couple weeks before the framers get started, but we obviously still have a week or more to go on the foundation work, so there's still time to work the schedule.

Our Little (2000 square foot) Hole in The Ground

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:56:00 +0000

We are finally Building!

After a year and half since purchasing a lot, and countless banks who said "we don't loan to self-builders", we have finally gotten approval for a construction loan! In an effort to build a huge home on a miniscule budget, we had decided to act as our own General Contractor -- but most banks are very wary of dealing with "owner/builders" -- in fact, since the banking fallout, even banks that used deal with self-builders have told us that "they don't do that any more". But after much search, Normandy bank has taken a chance on us.

Monday morning we officially broke ground on our new home. Sanders is our full-service foundation and excavating contractor, and they brought out the big equipment.

By the end of the day Monday, we couldn't even see the building site for the big piles of dirt.

But there was definitely a big hole hiding behind those piles of dirt.

But the discovery the next morning of our hole taking on a little water has lead to our first cost overrun. The amount of water was not drastic, and it didn't actually interfere with their ability to continue working -- but being August, and it hasn't rained in about a month, if we're taking on water now, we're really in trouble come next spring. So we made the decision to add a second sump pump pit.

Here are our footings and sumps in place:

With gravel in place and the forms delivered, they are ready to set and pour walls on Monday.

Dream House

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:45:00 +0000

I think it might actually happen...

About 18 months ago, we purchased a half-acre lot in an older, established subdivision, with grandiose plans to build our dream home. We put together a design, and set about trying to get estimates. It became apparent though, over the next few months, that our minds had bitten off more than our pocketbook could chew. So the whole idea was shelved for a while.

Then I sat down and trimmed down the design (a little anyway, it wouldn't be our Dream House if I had trimmed down a lot), simplified the footprint a bit (to bring the cost per square foot down a little), and started over getting estimates. This time, things were a looking a little tight, but it just might be feasible -- if we eliminated the overhead costs of a general contractor by managing the project ourselves, and chopped out some of the labor costs by doing much of the internal work ourselves. But how to find a bank that was willing to lend a construction loan to a "self-builder".

Even in this economy, post-banking crisis, advertisements and mailings for Mortgages are relatively frequent -- but only select banks deal with Construction Loans, because it creates greater risk (there's no collateral until the house is complete) and greater management overhead (they have to inspect your progress at various intervals). And most of those banks require a General Contractor/Builder -- some even have a short list of General Contractors, and will not work with any others. But in this present stingy-lending economy, the few banks that used to consider loaning to self-builders have ceased to take on that risk. But after months of searching, we finally found a willing lender.

We now have a commitment from Normandy Corporation to finance construction, and have secured our building permit. Now we are refreshing the bids on construction, and if we can actually Close on the construction loan soon, we just may be breaking ground within the next couple weeks. Of course, if I had a dime for every time I've told someone over the past year that we were only a "couple weeks away from breaking ground", I'd probably have the house paid off already.

If anyone is interested, here are the floor plans for our new "scaled-back" Dream Home.

Demolition Man, The Sequel

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:44:00 +0000

[I hadn't intended to leave such a large time gab between the last cliffhanger post and this one, had a few other things come up that were higher priority than blogging]

When last we left our intrepid home repair hero (um, I mean Me), he had successfully removed a 60"x30"x72" shower/tub enclosure from the bathroom, without causing any damage to the framing or plumbing.

With that out, I was able to inspect for signs of water damage (after all, there had been some form of crack on the bottom of the tub on and off for twelve years). There were some water stains around the edges where the caulking had apparently not entirely done its job, but there was no buckling or warping of the wood. There were no signs of water ever getting through the crack in the tub. In fact, inspecting the tub that now lay in pieces in my driveway, it appears the crack had always only been in the gelcoat surface, and had never gone all the way through the fiberglass structure. Unfortunately though, as you can see in the picture, there were signs of mold growth on the insulation.

So, time to pull out the contaminated insulation, and use a little bleach wash on the studs just in case the mold had invisibly spread to them. There were no signs of mold on the two "short walls", so I left that insulation in place. Here you can see the exorcised framing.

In addition, newer tub models do not have their drains in exactly the same location as the one I just removed -- so I was going to have to widen the cutout for the drain, and cutoff the drain tailpipe to move the drain plumbing. I broke out the reciprocating saw again. This would be the final demolition step -- after this I could get to the fun part of installing the new tub. Widening the cutout was no big deal -- but I should have reverted to the dremmel for cutting off the drain pipe -- sitting right behind the drain pipe was a copper supply line, and yup, I nicked that sucker just enough for water to come spraying out.

What happened next was just the sort of chaotic panic you would expect when water is suddenly spraying uncontrollably in your house. I ran to our front coat closet where I thought our main water shutoff valve was, while my wife ran around turning other faucets on to try to relieve the pressure on the leak (unfortunately, we have pretty decent water pressure in our house, so the leak was still spraying strongly even with nearly everything turned on).

We have three valves in the front closet -- two smaller, and one larger valve. The two smaller ones each shutoff the outdoor house bibs on either side of the house. I have used those to "winterize" by shutting off the supply from inside for the winter. I have always assumed, though never had a reason to confirm, that the big valve was the main shutoff for the house. Wrong. Apparently, the larger one is just a master control for the two smaller ones. Yes, that valve essentially just shuts off the two external hose bibs and nothing else. So, then I run out to the front yard to where the water meter pit is to see if I can get the cover off. Turns out those things have a pentagonal nut holding them on. Every wrench or socket I have is designed for hexagonal nuts. I run to my neighbors to see if he can help. He runs over with an armload of various wrenches, and after extensive fiddling, manages to get the cover off, and we finally succeed in shutting of the water supply to the whole house.

Luckily, the leak was spraying almost directly downward inside the crawlspace. The good news being that nothing else got wet, the bad news being the big puddle of water in the crawlspace -- and, of course, the broken pipe. Turns out I had nicked the pipe right at a T-intersection where three different pipes were connected.

Now, I know very little about sweating copper pipe, and I certainly wasn't going to start with a repair like this. A friend of mine suggested that I get some compression fittings and attach a plastic fitting to the three copper pipes to fit everything back together again.
So I ran out and purchased the necessary compression fittings and T-fitting and had a Go. Got everything put together, went out and turned the water on -- water sprayed from almost all my fittings. So, I try again, take all the fittings off, re-seat, and try again. I probably killed 6-8 hours trying to get that to work before I finally gave up.

Next day, I called a plumber, who came out and sweated new copper pipe in its place in about 90 minutes, and the whole thing held together without problems on the first attempt. So, now I just blew $300 fixing a problem on a project I had only planned on spending about $300 on. That little nicked pipe just doubled the cost of my little bathroom renovation project.

But at least demolition was complete, and I could now concentrate on getting back to the business of putting in my new tub -- stay tuned for the installation story.

The Daddy Song

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:09:00 +0000

Composed and performed by Christopher Matthew Willman

Lyrics:

I Like Daddy
I Love Daddy
I Like Daddy
GooBlahdoGaGoGaDoooo!!!!!!

Remains of the Bathe

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:33:00 +0000

... Or Part One of "How to Replace your Bathtub" : Demolition

Within a couple months of this house having been completed, the tub in our master bath developed a crack along the bottom. Since the house was still under warranty, the builder sent someone out to "fix" it.

Now, I would think, that if a tub cracks within a few months, then either 1) this tub unit has a manufacturing flaw, or B) It was installed incorrectly. But in either case, the logical fix should be to remove and replace, right? No, apparently this tub unit is so large, it can only be moved in before the walls are in place, so their "fix" involved some kind of epoxy repair kit. It lasted five or six years, and then the crack returned.
Unfortunately, this time it was well past the warranty, so I got a tub repair kit from Lowe's and fixed it myself. I've lost track of how many times now I have repaired the crack, but the time between repairs shrinks with each successive attempt. So, given that we are likely going to sell the house this summer, and the current hacked 12-year-old tub would not pass any kind of inspection, we decided it was time to replace the tub.

Our current tub is a standard size (60" x 30") fiberglass tub with integrated walls. Yes, that's right -- no seams, the walls are all one with the tub. It seems they can do this during construction, because they bring it in before they finish framing the internal walls.

So, to get this thing out, we either had to demolish walls, or we had to cut apart the tub. While I am sure that taking a sledgehammer to a wall would be fun and therapeutic, I opted for the latter.

First though, I had to remove the caulking from around the edges and baseboards near the tub and remove the faucet and fixtures. Then cut a couple inches of drywall away around the entire perimeter, and unscrew the tub from the studs. I was hoping that after removing the screws that I would at least be able to jiggle the tub around, maybe pull in out a little ways from the wall, but it was still snug. So, time to cut.

Of course, cutting through fiberglass is not a task to be taken lightly -- flying fiberglass splinters can be seriously deadly, and breathing in fiberglass "sawdust" is nearly as bad. So this meant protecting nearly every surface in the bathroom, and then donning long pants, long sleeves, a full face mask, safety goggles, and a respirator. This is my I-am-Darth-Vader-from-the-Planet-Vulcan outfit.

Everything I had read suggested using a metal-cutting blade on a reciprocating saw -- but I was worried about possibly cutting into the studs in the process, or worse, cutting through the plumbing. That would be "bad".

So I used a reciprocating saw for the portions well away from anything that could be damaged and used a dremmel with cutting bit for the sides, especially near the plumbing.

I cut the entire tub lengthwise down the middle, though it was still jammed nicely in the alcove. I could jiggle it around, but there wasn't enough room to wiggle free. So I cut the front half in half again (quartered), and was finally able to pull all the pieces out.

Success! I actually managed to remove the entire monster without damaging any framing or plumbing [insert witty foreshadowing remark here]!

If it looks like the demolition phase is done -- think again. Stay tuned for Demolition Man, The Sequel.