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).

Kitchen Plumbing - the outcome (Day 9)

(The new plumbing -- those hoses near the floor in the center of the photo -- and the bare window wall where the sink used to be.)

The plumber proved to be competent, friendly and fast.  Within a few hours, the old sink was pulled away from the wall, and the pipes moved 90° around the corner.  The best thing he was able to do was remove a pipe running immediately under the window. This is good because it means we can put the new window in a little lower than the old one, which is at 43" (while still keeping the new one above counter-height, for future design changes).

We sawed the old unusable sink cabinet into pieces and lugged them all out to the dumpster (the sink was really really heavy, being cast iron -- it took the three of us together to move it).

Kitchen Plumbing (Days 8 & 9)

... And it did go fairly quickly, once we got the right piping.  Finishing up the plumbing mess of moving the pipes for the upstairs bathroom vertically about 10 inches, that is.

If you recall, the last entry ended on Monday night, with no water to the second floor, after a hard day of things-not-going-as-easily-as-we-expected.  Tuesday morning dawned bright and cold; one plumbing issue was solved in the first half hour, but then we had the typical delaying problems: hadn't bought enough couplings, figured out a more elegant, less risky solution to a specific problem -- but that meant that another pipe was too short, etc.

In the end, after a total of 9 trips to the hardware store, removal of some ceiling (dusty work) and a couple of flooding showers at couplings that hadn't been sealed well enough, we now have lovely new plumbing to the bathroom.  It is out of the way! It doesn't leak! It uses this fabulous new piping proprietorial to the hardware store which snaps into fittings without having to glue it or wrap it -- and, better yet, which snaps out, so you can revise and refit at need. Here are two photos of the work, that bring me a sigh of proud relief, but will be meaningless to you.

We even insulated the hot water pipe for 70% of its run, which is cheap and recommended (if you're in there anyway -- it doesn't save enough money or energy to make it worth ripping into walls to access the pipes).

We also got permits for the remaining work -- after being sent up and down the Portland Development Offices Building in a failed attempt to help us by saving us money. See, we had gotten permits for this project in 2007 (without having since then done any of the work that requires permits). They expired after a year, but for a while yesterday it was an open question - in the minds of the city employees -- whether we could just re-open those permits, saving us about $200. However, our original permits were for home-owner work and these new ones are for contractors, thus, we require new permits (it took three people to figure that out, and two visits, because the offices closed while we were between floors).  All in all, almost everyone we spoke to was friendly and helpful and trying to save us money, but still in the end we'll have to go back three times to that downtown office building (not all their fault for that third visit, which we'll do tomorrow -- we needed to get some signatures).

We ended the day by cleaning up (took over an hour, even though the room is essentially empty) and HomoDommi finished framing in the wall that the sink will be moved to. We were all so exhausted that the house retired for the night before 10 pm, unheard-of early for us.

As I write this blog entry, a legally permitted plumber is ripping up the kitchen, moving the plumbing for the sink about 6 feet and a 90° angle to the left, and adding pipes for garbage disposal and dishwasher.  He and I talked through the options to keep the existing sink in use in the interim between now and when we'll have the new sink cabinetry -- but it will save an additional trip by the plumber (and thus, $$$) if we close off the old sink permanently today.

So, for the duration, we will have no kitchen sink or dishwasher. Aside from a tiny vanity sink in the bathroom, the closest sink is in the basement.  That one is beyond grody, to use a term from my youth -- it's been the main cleaning spot for the cat litter boxes and all HomoDommi's work and art projects, and looking at it, I am reminded of the infamous toilet scene in the movie Trainspotting (I don't recommend you look it up on YouTube unless you have a very strong stomach). We won't be using that directly for dishes. (But it occurs to me that we might be able to hook the portable dishwasher up to that downstairs faucet. Hmmmm. Must consider....)

HomoDommi returns to Boise tomorrow, but will be back next Tuesday. The electrician comes on Monday. Tonight we will have a confab about what can be done next to speed up the process, at least towards finishing off the sink cabinetry.

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.

Opportunity #3: Plumbing, Heating & Venting, oh my!

Of the five inside corners in the kitchen (ceiling), only one is where all the action is happening. Before we tore down the dropped ceiling, we had stuck our heads up through a hole on the opposite side of the room.  We knew there was a problem back in this corner -- there was glistening and blackness and shine reflecting back the flashlight beam, while everywhere else just looked like dust and dried, peeling, paint. The image I had formed was of a black garbage bag stuffed under the floorboards of the room upstairs (full? empty?couldn't tell, but there seemed to be a lot of garbage bag). We tore down the ceiling anyway. 

You see the corner here, in a photo I took before we removed the 2x4 joists that held up the dropped ceiling.  The green wall is the east wall (adjoining the tv/guest room, for those who know the house), which will form the long counter cooking/prep area in the final kitchen. The tan wall is north. The north wall is an outer wall, although there is a little lean-to built on to the house just here -- originally a back entrance, but long ago converted to a half-bathroom (you can see the edge of the door frame cutting into the very bottom of the photo).

Upstairs, above this corner, is a toilet (against the green wall), set a foot or so into the room from the north wall. There is also a heat register in the floor between the toilet and the north wall. The black dusty serpent is, of course, the "garbage bag" we had seen with a flashlight.  It is actually ductwork (see a sample here), supplying heat to the heat register upstairs. This is a new kind of ductwork (none of us had heard of it before seeing this and looking online). It was apparently placed there by the plumber hired to move the toilet in 2002 (during an emergency remodel of  the bathroom, after extensive damage caused by a toddler investigating the flushing capabilities of her father's shaving kit. By the way, results of investigation: full stoppage and backflow).  The other black piping you see is water outflow from the sink and shower in that room, directed to the sewer line -- a large pipe running from upstairs to cellar and out the front of the house (hidden behind some of the green wall).

Let me take a moment to explain about ceilings and floors (it is completely obvious if you know anything about houses, but I didn't, so I'll share).  There is a area of about 8" between the floor of the bathroom and the ceiling of the kitchen -- the subflooring. Things like ductwork and plumbing and electricity all run through the subflooring, hidden below your feet upstairs, and above your head downstairs.

So, the bad news here is that the current ductwork hangs well below the subflooring, into the gap formerly created between the two ceilings.  That's because the gap in the subflooring is already full -- of plumbing.

One option is to move the heating ductwork, have the register come out of the wall of the bathroom -- upstream, so to speak, of the plumbing. We'd have to go back to the more familiar tin between-joists ductwork, in the wall.  And we'd have to figure out where the branch comes off the main trunk of the furnace, to make sure that other rooms upstairs continue to get heat, too.

Another option is to tuck the current black plastic flexible ductwork into a soffit around the edge of the ceiling of the kitchen. In one sense, this is the easiest option, but it does involve building a soffit around the kitchen, which is both yet more work, and it influences the design.  The whole point of getting rid of the dropped ceiling was to raise the feeling of space in the room -- will a soffit lower it again?  Or make the room feel more narrow down below?  Hard to figure that one out without living in it.

Another challenge for this same corner is that we had been planning to install a vent from the stove (along the currently-green, east wall) straight outside.  Right through that same corner. But that can't happen straightforwardly because, again, of the plumbing. If we go with a soffit, that space is already mostly claimed by the heating duct.  And anyway, the ceiling of the lean-to bathroom extends above that height, so if the plumbing weren't there, we'd just be venting the stove smoke into the bathroom. (Oops!)
We're still working on the stove vent options.