Weekend work, urr, non-work

[Updated version to correct text over-writing images. At least, I hope so. I also made a few textual edits to clarify some details.]

Saturday ended up being a day off, although we didn't plan it that way. HomoDommi invited me to his book club (which was quite pleasant) and then the household joined old friends for the evening, just to kibbutz.

On Sunday, we geared up for work and almost instantly were at a standstill.  This is what much of Sunday felt like.

That is, staring at a hole in the floor, scratching our heads, in more than a little exasperation.

The cause: the hole we made when we removed the chimney.  It's a nice, clean hole down into the basement, about 18" square. When it was filled with chimney, it was surrounded by drywall (in fact, we only removed the last remnant of the drywall last month during the deconstruction). When it was a chimney surrounded by drywall, contractors would use the small gaps to run wires and plumbing through.

Here is a photo, taken when we began this project 3 years ago.  It shows the chimney still in place in the kitchen (although the front wall of covering has been removed).

Next, the same view after getting rid of the bricks (and the ceiling except for the 2x4s).  You can see all those wires running through the gap behind the chimney, and, less obviously, a couple rigid, pale yellow pipes running up the near corner -- between the chimney and the (still-standing, in the photo) drywall. (I've talked about them before, in my list of infrastructure opportunities.)

I blogged about a ten days ago about the productive day HomoDommi and I had, moving the pipes that run up to the second floor -- some of that involved moving them from the front corner of the space shown back into the true wall, between the joists. And the electricians came in and wired the area for a light switch, and also ran wires through for the ceiling lights in the new kitchen.

In all this, we didn't realize that one wire -- one very fat, large wire -- hasn't been neatly tucked back into that between-joists frame.  You can see it in the two close-up photos.

This wire, which is taut, goes all the way up to the attic and provides most (if not all) of the lighting on the second floor. We need it to not be crossing out into the airspace in front of that hole.




Another issue is, how do you fill a hole?  I mean, solidly, so that a refrigerator can rest upon it (that's what the masking tape shows, the front of the fridge), and so that people might someday walk across it.  That is, without reflooring a massive area around the hole, and while adding a laundry chute to the area.

Still the day was not totally given over to frustration.  The Texan and I installed the second of the two concrete boards backing the sink.  And we picked out a window to install over the sink in that wall (as shown).

Electricians and Inspection and old wiring

Monday and Tuesday was the Time of the Electricians. It was pretty painful. I haven't a high opinion of professional electricians, colored by HomoDommi's sheer disgust for their methods (which is, in his experience, always to find the shortest route between two points, regardless of elegance) and by an old memory of Peaceable referring (at least 30 years ago) to some conventional wisdom about the lack of intelligence in electricians as a group. But I've never interacted with one before.  I do like the guy we hired -- he asked the right questions when he was here to give an estimate, and had some suggestions that were sound to me. (I had liked the other electrician who bid, too, but for the opposite reasons -- he was older than me, didn't say much, and seemed to view this as a completely normal job, nothing special).

Monday morning brought the young, questioning/suggesting guy, with an assistant.  They said, "Hey" and "Dude" a lot, so I refer to them in my mind as "kids" but HomoDommi says the assistant is pushing 35. (I'm not sure how he can tell, but I trust his judgement.)  They set to with hammers and saws, and lots of bangs and buzzes, and the sounds of plaster collapsing. I sat in my office cringing at every collapse echoing up the stairwell, anxious that the history of the kitchen was being destroyed before I had time to work it out.

It took them two full days, which I'm sure was longer than they intended, and while they did take out a large swathe at countertop height, they left most of the walls intact. We now have outlets for appliances that will someday sit on the counters, three lights in the ceiling; outlets and switches for lights, dishwasher, garbage disposal; and wiring hanging out of the wall for under-cabinet lighting (to be finalized when we have wall cabinets installed to be underlit).  It looks like a competent job to me.

And apparently it is competent.  This morning, the city inspector came by to check on the plumbing and the electricity "rough ins".  She was friendly, but not a big talker.  She approved both.

She did have to check one thing. We are keeping our existing stove, which has a double oven, a small one on top not much bigger than a toaster oven, and an almost full-sized one on the bottom.  We love this range. However, what stopped the inspector up is that it has one of those big ol' three-prong plugs.  Apparently new ranges have "four-wire plugs" (still 220V) (I don't know if they still are three-prongs, but I'd guess not). Code requires an outlet for a four-wire plug. The law was grand-fathered in, however, so that if there is still original lathe and plaster around the plug, you don't have to have a four-wire.  She made it clear that she thought the electricians were skirting around Code by not taking out the lathe-and-plaster (tut tut). Apparently standard practice now is to rip out all the plaster during a remodel as extensive as ours, so that the wall is open, and then easier to replace such outlets.  This relieves future owners of the work to install the new kind of outlet (which will require ripping out the lathe and plaster around it, not to mention any drywall over it, as code insists) when they want to replace a then-broken-down stove sometime in the future.

So now we have a new decision: should we get a new range (and get an updated electrical) in favor of those future owners?  This is the only appliance we had planned to keep in the new kitchen, and I've been worrying that it will show wear and tear when up against shiny new sink, microwave, dishwasher and fridge. Should fix what ain't broke?  It will cost another $1,000 or so to be responsible to those unknown future owners (including that cost of getting the electricity fixed, too).

Yet more to consider.... I'm getting really tired of all these yet-more-to-considers.

Back to work on the Kitchen: Reno Days 4-7

My title is a little misleading, because while I call it "Days 4-7", almost a month lapsed between Days 3 and 4.  HomoDommi arrived back at the house, somewhat suddenly, last Thursday evening.  He'll be here until this Thursday (3 days from now) and probably will be back next week.  So things are starting to happen. Just, none of them are particularly visible.

One day was lost when we essentially shopped, without finding what we were looking for (doors and windows).  Two days were spent on electricity -- improving switches for the basement lights, and ditching a visible cable carrying power to a sconce over the stairs.  This only tangentially relates to the kitchen -- the visible wiring is now hidden, and the switches now make more sense. You turn on the lights for the stairs when standing in the kitchen, and you turn on the lights in the basement as you enter the basement. (I kept my weight down over the last 4 years by having to cross the basement and run up a storey just to turn the lights in my room on or off. Now that I don't live there anymore, I will have to run downstairs if I forgot to turn them off.)

(The photo above, by the way, is a view formerly not available -- there used to be wall and cabinets in the way.  But I'm standing right in front of where the sink will be installed, so this is kind of the view through the interior window.  We'll have to do something to make the view a little more interesting, though.)

The Texan and I could do nothing during the electrical work. It is a one-man job, and the power was off to the basement, so laundry and similar weekend chores were off-limits. Luckily, we had braggable 60° weather and sun, so we did the first round of spring cleaning on the lawn, mowing and picking up leaves from our spring-shedding oak tree.  The daffodils have been in bloom for over a week now.

Today, we took on the plumbing -- that is, the water pipes that extend across the ceiling of the kitchen to deliver hot and cold to the bathroom upstairs.  They had been hidden in the dropped ceiling area, and need to be moved up. Here, you see the state of the kitchen for much of today -- that is, a pipe (or two or three) hanging down from where it's attached to the joist, dripping steadily into a bucket. We have turned the water off to the second floor, but the shut-off valve won't fully shut-off.

The job, sadly, isn't done yet, as it nears bedtime and HomoDommi is out on a pre-arranged evening with friends.  We hit a tricky area -- that same corner that has too much plumbing and ducting.  The little 1/2" pipes (all plastic, which makes for much easier amending) were just a wee bit too stiff to fit in-between all that other stuff.  But after a fourth or fifth visit to the local hardware store, and a further in-depth chat with Kevin there, we've switched piping for this last section, to some relatively much more flexible stuff that will be able to weave around the other pipes and ducts.  

I doubt that (despite promises and protestations as he ran out late to his appointment) we'll have running water in the bathroom upstairs tonight.  But tomorrow it really should go quickly.

Shockingly icky work

I've discussed the electrical issues we've been facing, opened up by the removal of the chimney. We have live wires trailing from attic to basement in that open space, and they had to be tucked behind the linen closet on the second floor. More broadly, the causal chain is that we need to fix the electric wiring in the attic because:

• It would not be safe to lay floorboards over the current wiring, because some of them are bare exposed wire (50-80 years old)...
  
• We want floorboards in the attic, so we can store stuff currently in the basement...
• We want to store stuff in the attic, so we can use the basement as the temporary kitchen when we gut the kitchen...
• We want to gut the kitchen, so we can remodel the kitchen.

We also want to fix things up so that we can put proper, or at least improved, insulation in the attic. What's there now is a lung-filling dusty mess of 4+ inches of grey material, like old packing material, or the stuffing from chairs you find abandoned at the back of sleepy antique stores. We aren't sure what the R-value is of this stuff, or even how old it is -- when did people start insulating? It looks a little like the bolts of stuff friends gave us after insulating their house a few years ago (they had extra), which is about R-7 for 4 inches -- which is about the same as 4-inches of the fiberglass pink stuff you buy in huge fluffy rolls. (We should be aiming for R-38 in our climate, but old houses, unless you fill the attic to the brim with insulation, are lucky to get to R-30.) At any rate, we want to slow the rate of heat loss now that wilder weather and expensive heating oil is here.

The third reason we need to fix the attic wiring is to free up some circuits to add light and power to the new kitchen. The garbage disposal and (I believe) the dishwasher will each need dedicated circuits. In addition, we will be going from a current total of two ceiling lights and three outlets to:

• two hanging lights,
  
• a stove vent,
  
• a recharging station for all our mobile phones, iPods and batteries (a kitchen for the 21st century!),
  
• a handful of task lights,
  
• another handful of electric outlets for appliances, and, if I get my way...
  
• a series of small white LEDs accentuating the tops of all the cabinets.

For all these reasons, we are working on the attic. It's icky work. You can't stand up; you have to wear a mask. Even with the mask (and safety glasses) you get insulation fluff embedded in your hair and clothes and eyes. There is, ironically, no power to the attic itself, it merely supplies power to the floor beneath it, so we working in the dark except for a headlamp like a coal miner.

The wiring itself has -- some of it -- been patched together poorly (with wires spliced together and then spliced again, and again, for chains of 6 or 7 splits; with no to-code junction boxes, only electrical tape wrapped around the splice like a temporary bandage). Some of it is in good shape -- some original knob and tube work from 1915 is still safe and better left alone than "fixed". We don't yet have those floorboards installed, so HomoDomi has to balance on the edges of 2x4s, whilst avoiding those occasionally live wires and the holes in the middle -- one left by the chimney (under the hammer in the center of this photo) and the entryway to the attic (out of which I am poking my head).

HomoDomi has done it all -- I have been quite willing to be the runner, from top of the ladder on the second floor down to the far end of the basement to turn on and off circuits, or to pick out some screws, or to grab a newly recharged battery. And back again (58 steps plus 10 ladder rungs plus two crossings of the house laterally. Who needs a Stairmaster?). I have an odd fear of heights: I have enjoyed the landscape view out, and down, from the Seattle Needle, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the top of The Arch in St. Louis, or the tip of Köln Cathedral -- but I do not care for internal holes, surrounded on all sides by building but empty for many feet directly underneath you. Perhaps it's not heights I'm afraid of, but depths. Long empty depths of space, below.