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.