Infrastructure Opportunities

(I don't know if you're interested in this level of detail. I suppose you can just skip the post if you don't care. If you do want me to continue at this level -- or have suggestions for clarification -- let me know. Otherwise I'll keep later such discussions off the blog.)

This photo was taken standing in front of the basement door, looking towards the dining room door.  The corner of the table in the lower right is the middle of where the plan has the fridge installed (the blue tape on the wall and floor marks major landmarks -- the top of the fridge, the cabinetry outlines).

The big gap in the wall, between joists, is where once the chimney resided. (Here are some good photos of Before, from March 2007.) It is 20" x 20" square column of open air, running from the ceiling of the basement, to a cap at knee level in a hallway closet on the second floor.  Since taking out the bricks in April 2007, we've been intending to put a laundry chute there. How time flies when you're doing other things.

Water Pipes to the Bathroom Upstairs
In that same space, there are also water pipes (the more rigid pale yellow verticals in the photo), and electricity running from basement to subfloor of the second storey, with stops for light switches on this floor both sides of the wall (dining room and kitchen). Right now, the pipes are about 16" and 18" away from the wall -- they were installed when the chimney was still there, and that was open space.  Now, of course, we don't want to have a stack for the water pipes sticking out into the room, so we'll tidy them back into the joist space within the wall-to-be.

The water pipes take a few right turns -- crossing the top of the kitchen along the supporting joists of the dropped ceiling, then, at the outside wall of the house, turning up again to feed the sink of the bathroom upstairs.  They also feed the shower, but that is over the space where I'm standing in these photos, so somewhere along that piping, more pipes split off again.  When the plumbers were giving us an estimate of work for the other side of the kitchen, one of them noticed these pipes and spontaneously exclaimed.  "If you ever do anything with those pipes, change 'em.  We used 'em for one year in the early '90's, and they are a piece of crap."  Apparently they tend to crack and leak.

So, one of the first things that HomoDommi has to do is move the pipes -- they need to be up about 10 inches, above the lathe-and-plaster ceiling (hard to see at this angle...if you can make out the gray pipe jutting out from the upper left, which is an old dead pipe, abandoned by previous plumbers. We'll move the yellow pipes up to that level).  The intent, as long as there's shifting going on, is to replace the apparently shoddy piping with new CPVC piping.

It isn't honestly all that big a job -- an afternoon, really. And it is much easier to do with the ceiling open and so broken up, because everything is exposed. But the water has to be turned off in the house.

Laundry Chute
If you look online, you'll find dozens of DIY instructions for installing laundry chutes. One of the most common suggestions is to use heating ductwork, which happens to come in a size that will fit in between the joists of existing houses -- that is, about 12" x 4" or 5".  We bought one section that size to play with, and decided it would be nearly useless except for washcloths and baby clothes. No bed sheets were going to fit down that space.

There is available some larger ductwork, however -- 12" x 8".  Easy peasy -- whole comforters will fit down that.  I've just tossed a piece into the space to show one possible configuration (I think I've got one that works, but it's not shown here). The fridge would start right along the right-hand edge of the silvery duct.

The Heating Register
The third thing we had planned to have in this space was the heating register. You can see a corner of the existing one in the background of the top photo -- a dark rectangle in the wall by the corner, about a foot from the floor, mostly obscured by a sheet of white-painted plywood leaning away from the wall. (The plywood is there to discourage Harry from jumping down into the heating duct system, something he loves to do at every chance, but which makes my skin crawl at the thought.  He got stuck once in the cold-air shaft of the furnace itself.)

Currently the heat register for the kitchen shares a heating duct in the wall with a twin register on the dining room wall (pictured).  The constraint on moving the duct is that all the space immediately next to it is taken up with pocket door.  And once we started divvying up the chimney space, the heating duct would block the laundry chute.  We can leave out the laundry chute, but that would still involve adding one more heating duct (and there's all sorts of physics to do with air balance in the house that we will, in that case, have to pay attention to).

My solution is to install a toe-kick heater. Or rather, a toe-kick sized register, with duct work under the cabinet to the existing heat outlet -- it's only two feet.  You can see an example here, although I'd rather find a metal one (they exist). In fact, on one of the gazillion Ikea "fans" pages, there are several people talking about doing the exact same thing, so we are not alone in having this problem.

I have to say, if you've made it this far in the post, you have more interest than me. I'm bored with it, even!