Deep Soak Tub

Not really. Just our plumbing passing the rough-in test.

The rough in plumbing is DONE. Now I have a trunk full (literally) of unneeded fittings to return.

Holland Preview?

This was a little surprise this evening.  How long has this one hung on?  Must be about 15 years now.  It was out back under the dogwood.

Moving Day

Today was moving day for all cabinets, bookcases, and "stuff" in the parts of the house where Pieter will refinish the floors.  Angela helped all day.  We finished the plumbing in the morning--it was a HUGE help to have a second set of hands and PVC cement brushes for the bigger pipes in the basement--and then we moved everything in about three hours the afternoon.

I didn't take any action shots, but thought you might like to see some of the results.

Lots more room for dining

Looks like a bachelor pad for sure now!

Look! We can walk behind the piano!

That is three cabinets and a coffee table deep

Eleanor, your room took the brunt of the small stuff.

If you are lucky I will clear your bed before you return.

You already heard that we finished the plumbing.  OK, almost finished.  The bathtub leaked slowly at the drain, so I need to redo it with thread sealant and try again.

Yesterday I worked primarily on wiring.  I have nearly all the wire pulled now.  The vent fans are completely installed and wired.  With the plumbing and the wiring rough-ins almost ready I am only a few hours from being able to put all the tools away and do a serious cleanup.

I also made time this weekend to finish the last batch of cabinet doors and drawer fronts for the girls' room:

Jeremy's New Mattress

Jeremy,

I saw that you didn't think much of the soft, lumpy mattresses in Venice, so I took a little time today to replace your mattress with something a little smoother and firmer.

Those are the granite slabs from the tops of the bunny boxes.  Angela helped me move them.  Today was the day we moved the bunnies into your room, and we needed a place to put the tops.  Your mattress is on James' bed so that Joy can't chew it or worse.

We also used the bunny boxes to block the bunnies from getting under the desks.

Hiding Things

Another Round of Painting Done

I finished the second round of painting doors and drawer fronts. These are for the girls' bedroom. This was a daunting batch: a lot of pieces and a lot of inset panels.

There is another batch of them to go, but at least the remaining pieces are smaller.

A Little Progress

I started the day by finishing off the framing for the skylight.  I wanted to work on it while there was good light but before it got hot.  Here is the finished product.  It looks so great I might not put sheetrock on it.

And here are a few of the offcuts:

My next goal was to permanently place the tub.  It kind of needs to be in one place if I'm going to attach a drain line to it.

Placing the tub requires shims.  You need to build the studs out to the thickness of the tub so the wall material will be flat when it comes down over the rim.  I had a half-sheet of 1/4" plywood that was waiting for just such an opportunity.  A few minutes with the table saw and...

Other than the fact that I had to do it at all, putting up the shims was fun.  Easy to cut and instantaneous to put up thanks to the brad gun.  Ta-da: shims installed, and the tub screwed to the studs:

That's funny.  The textured bottom is currently almost invisible to the naked eye but it shows up like crazy in the picture.

The faucet end needed thicker shims to make up that inch.  It took three different thicknesses because the wall wasn't straight.  I didn't put up that wall.

Did I show you this phone from the other day?  When I put the tub in place I discovered that the floor is way out of level side to side.  Those are plastic shims to level it.  I will trim them off near the edge of the tub, and they will end up covered with tile.

After the tub I work a little while on placing electrical boxes but that was just because I was trying to find some more things I needed so I wouldn't have to go to the hardware store for just two plumbing fittings.  It didn't work, though. I couldn't make much progress when I knew that I had plumbing to finish.

I ended up going to the hardware store twice anyway, because when I got home and started working on the drains downstairs I figured out that I had forgotten to put in the vent in the wall behind the girls' toilet, and of course I needed some different pieces for that.  I ended up not finishing the drain lines, but I did get everything from the girls' toilet back to the main drain cemented and nearly everything else dry-fit.  Only an hour or two of plumbing left before I get to pressure test it.

You can see the new connection to the main drain at the upper left:

And finally, I am not the only one working on his house.  Magic has turned her hollow log into a tunnel.  The landscaping doesn't show up as well as I would like in the photo.

Under Pressure

Not just me under pressure!  I finished the supply plumbing and have it turned on so that I know there are not any leaks.

Turning it on just about gave me heart trouble.  I had installed some nice full-bore ball valves when I cut off the old plumbing, so I could stand in the laundry room as I turned them on.  S-l-o-w-l-y, listening for the hiss of water spraying all over the place.  Do you have any idea how much racket two bathrooms' worth of empty lines make as the water squashes the air into little corners?  I was up and down the stairs a dozen times to see where it was leaking.  It turned out that it just took a while for everything to settle down, especially since I just opened the valves a little bit until I was sure it wasn't leaking.

So, I've been telling you about my three-dimensional puzzle.  What do you think?

It isn't as crazy as you might think.  That is just what happens when you have two lavatories backing up onto a shower.  Here it is from the other side (the girls' bath).

Nick and Angela came over Friday night.  They brought me dinner and Angela helped with the plumbing.  I was glad to have her company and help.  I had all the pipe dry-fit, but prep work takes incredibly long.  It took about 12 hours total to go from dry-fit to soldered.  Ream, polish, flux, assemble, repeat...

Angela got some action shots for you.

Now it is on to all the other little things necessary to get the bathrooms ready for drywall.

First on the list is to finish the drains. I have the upstairs done, but not the downstairs (as you can see from that second action shot. Unfortunately Home Depot foiled me this evening. I needed a 4" to 3" reducer and they had put a 3" to sewer line connection (whatever that is) in the box instead. It looks about right until you get it home.

So I dry-fit what I could. I can't finalize anything until I get that last piece, though, because I really have to start at the existing 4" line and work my way back to the vent stack I built upstairs.

There was something else I could do with the drains. You remember that I replaced the subfloor, and where the old tile floor was I had to build it up with multiple layers of plywood. Well, I needed to cut the hole for the toilet drains. I was more than a little nervous about this, but the reciprocating saw handled cutting a round hole in 3" of wood remarkably well.

Earlier today I made use of the daylight streaming though the new skylight and worked on the skylight box.  While it is possible that an extremely good carpenter would measure twice, cut once, I think most of them would use the same routine I did on all the compound angles: try some mock-ups to get the cuts going in the right direction, cut the boards long, and keep tweaking them until you have them right or you have made them too short and have to start over.  Each board was at least 10 trips up the ladder.  I finished it halfway.

I think I lose an hour of sleep tonight, so I had better quit my update here.

Pets

Joy decided to do a little remodeling of her squatter's shack.

That is also her reading material on the floor.  It was a National Geographic.

She also started taking apart the bathtub box for me but she didn't get very far.

I am more and more popular with Joy.  She comes running when I pull out her dinner.

Smudge will wait until morning.

I've had a hard time eating enough to keep up with Magic's cardboard appetite.  For a while she wasn't destroying everything, but then she got tired of the Kleenex box and took it apart.  Since I had to go to Petsmart anyway I decided to get her something a little more durable.  It is some sort of pressed-alfalfa hollow log.

We'll see.

Spring is Here

The weather turned cold for a moment overnight, but Spring is definitely here.  I got home just at sunset, but I there was just enough light to get you some photos, with occasional help from the flash.  Sorry, not the best flower photos, but you will still get a peek of Spring to carry you through any more cold days there.

Just don't ask me to name the flowers and we'll be OK.

Peaches

And of course the bloom in the stream...