Adventures in Renovation

I've had this big idea to do a slanted ceiling in the laundry room for a while now. The old ceiling was really low. I could easily touch it before. Bryan talked me into it and some electricians assured me that the service cable could move to somewhere it won't cause a problem.

The cool part is that when I do that, I also want to leave the original brick back wall exposed so that you can see the archways over top of the old door and window. I was worried the brick would be in horrible shape. But now that I've taken everything down, I think it's definitely workable. This brick probably looks nicer because it was on the exterior. It was meant to be seen.

Posted by at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've had a couple more electricians come out to take a look at the kitchen. Both of them agreed that the previous electrician did some really stupid stuff. Well no, I shouldn't say stupid because I think he knew exactly what he was doing was wrong. He just didn't care to do it the right way because he was lazy or something.

The big problem is the service cable runs all the way through the first floor and into the basement before it reaches the meter and panel box without any kind of disconnect. That means that if something accidentally penetrated that wire, the house would go up in flames and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it because there's nothing protecting it (like a circuit breaker). Also, he hooked up two circuits to one breaker. Probably the same day that he installed my ceiling fan blades upside down. That's just plain lazy.

Last year he was my hero. This year I shake my fist every time I say his name.

Posted by at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's so easy, even Dolls can do it!

Posted by at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hired Greg to be my small hauler this weekend. Once again I'm impressed at how much you can fit in his truck bed. We took a giant load of drywall and plaster to the dump on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Greg loves the scenery out at the Quartine Road landfill. I think he may move there when he retires.

We hauled all the walls and ceiling from the laundry room. Two layers of drywall on most of the walls even. Probably because they covered over one layer of drywall because it was water damaged. Still, removing and hauling drywall is SO much easier than plaster.

Oh wait... Did I mention the plaster? No, I didn't even post about that yet. Well the weekend before last I finally took down the plaster on the kitchen wall between the living room. Pretty straight forward and messy. The only surprise was finding window weights in the wall. So evidently the opening I kept calling a window really was a window with double hung panes of glass or something. No one can quite figure out why you would have a window in the middle of you're house tho. Vicki thinks it might be a ventilation thing like a shotgun house layout in New Orleans.

Anyway, as I was taking layer after layer down in the laundry room I thought to myself, "this is stupid! I should just cover over all of this instead of hauling it away and replacing it." But it's a good thing I did because on that back of a lot of it was water damage and mold. Yum!

I also found definite termite damage. It doesn't look like there are any active live termites in there anymore, but they had a good time on a bunch of wood. Luckily none of it is structural, just some wood siding that leads no where and such. I guess it's a good thing I'm planning on reframing those walls with steel studs instead.

Again, I found something interesting in the ceiling. This time an old window shutter. Just one. Not even used as scrap wood to connect anything together or anything. Just stuffed up there. Maybe the mice had something to do with that too. Add it to my list of stuff that came out of the ceiling in my house.

Posted by at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other little plumbing I did last weekend when I added the expansion tank, was to cap off the water supply to the laundry room. The old stuff was a mess. The steel pipes were old and rusty. They ran through the brick wall and partially though the concrete slab. They had to go. Instead I'm going to run the pluming for the laundry room up through the kitchen and then into the laundry room. Oh, which brings me to the laundry room layout I haven't explained yet. So much I haven't posted about.

Well, originally the laundry room was going to be setup so that the washer and dryer were against the back wall of the house (see diagram B). I think that's how it was set up before I bought the house and would have been the easiest because the hook-ups were already there.

After I did such extensive plumbing upstairs and demolished the chase/closet in the ketchen, I decided I could run the plumbing through the old kitchen closet to the main stack instead (see diagram A). This was going to be a lot cleaner and wouldn't have to drain the washer into the utility sink (something I'm not really fond of after I've seen sinks overflow from lint clogs and such). But then running the dryer vent would be much harder from this point. I never really figured out a good way to do that.

The best answer came when I considered moving the utility sink. With all the appliances and sink along the same wall the flow of the room was much much nicer (see diagram C). And if I built out a new wall I could run the plumbing and dryer vent behind it easily. AND I could run the vent for the oven fan straight through that wall too!

At first I thought this was too hard because the utility sink drain went into concrete. But the plan now is to cap off that drain completely, and run the drain horizontally into the kitchen and down into the basement. It only took me... 13 months or so to come up with that one.

Posted by at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week my web hosting company updated my server. Now my server can hold 10 Gigs of blog posts. I have no idea what the hell I'm going to do with 10 GBs of storage, but at least I get that warm, nerdy feeling from knowing it's there.

Since everything moved to a new server I took the opportunity to clean house. I upgraded to a newer version of Movable Type that has better comment spam filtering. Also, I'm trying to update some of the look and functionality of the blog. Having an ugly website is inexcusable for a designer. Spelling errors and bad grammer are perfectly good tho.

I'm adding great features like less pop-up windows, viewing posts by categories or project, better comment stuff (because I need encouragement), and a feature I like to call "the whole brevity thing." That way when I start to go into one of my boring, long-winded or overly technical rambles, those gorey details are hidden from view by default. If you really want to read it, you just click on the "Read the boring details..." link.

Anyway, in the process, I'm already screwing up the old styles and templates so stuff might look a little crappy for a while. Pardon our appearance while renovations are underway.

Posted by at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This weekend, I did a little plumbing. Baby steps. Gettin' back on that horse. The holidays over. We all survived our hangovers. Or sicknesses that prevented us from celebrating. Everyone got what they wanted for Christmas. Except Vicki, who still doesn't have a kitchen. So I'm rolling up my sleeves. Too bad I don't have a work shop full of magical elves to help me.

I finally put in the expansion tank into my plumbing that I've been planning on doing for over a month maybe. My hot water heater has been leaking ever since we moved in. Not very much. Just a few drips when it's running. I just put a bucket under it and had to empty it every week or so.

At first i thought I just needed a new T&P valve (the valve at the top of the tank that keeps your tank from exploding if the pressure gets too high). But then I talked to a few plumbers about it and they seemed to think that the valve should definitely outlast the water heater. My old roommate Bryan has the exact same problem and his water heater is brand new. Bryan did a bunch of internet research and found a great article about expansion tanks.

www.northogdencity.com/pdf/thermal.pdf

The problem seems to be that the water pressure coming in from the city is really high at both of our houses. We have a pressure regulator that keeps the water from exploding out of the faucet. But that pressure regulator also keeps water from back flowing into the city's line when the pressure increases inside your house. So every time our hot water heater leaked it was because pressure was reaching dangerous levels when it fired up. When Bryan bought his house, his old water heater had obviously exploded, flooded the basement and grew mold all over the built in closets. So the occasional little leak could be a seriously problem. Scary.

The good news is, the expansion tank totally fixed the problem. The expansion tank takes on water when the pressure increases over normal operating pressure (50 psi in my case). This was my first time soldering copper pipes. It was slow going, but so far no leaks. I rule!

That's how I feel when something goes right on the house. It's kinda rare when stuff works out pretty much the way I expect it to. But when it does, it's a natural high. I am the best!

Posted by at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)