4 stores and 82 years...

82 years is how old the pipe was, and 4 stores was how many places I went to get the parts. They're replacing our water main, and one of the city crew told us he wasn't sure how our vintage galvanized supply pipe was going to fare. Here's the valve at the property line, after I cut the pipe, and removed the piece. There was a step in the pipe, I removed that with the new one, and just sloped it from the street to the house. It's supposed to be 18" deep, I think it's closer to 12" at the house though. I don't think the ground even freezes that deep here, hasn't been a problem for the life of the house.



I thought that there was an adapter to 1" pipe, which was why I ended up going to 4 stores. I think the city side is 1" and the residential side is 3/4". Some of the threads were broken off the end of the piece I took out. I thought they'd be stuck inside the valve. They were disintigrated, so there wasn't much holding it on.



Here's all the joints inside sweated together. We have 2 shut off valves now, eventually we'll run 3/4" to the water heater. We haven't really had a problem until now, so we'll probably leave it for a while.

Here's an old listerine bottle I found while digging. Looks like it had a cork stopper, it's been under our water line for 82 years.

Progress Pics

Trim is currently being stained. This is the bathroom and dining room doors, I took the 2 corner pieces off, because I couldn't fix the plaster without taking them off. I didn't want to take off all the trim, since it's a little brittle.



View down the hall, the pantry door is currently taken off for stripping and varnishing. The butterfly hinges say they're made in Sweden.



Painted heat vent and door stop from Rejuevenation Hardware. There's a lot of sapwood in this piece of trim. The trim was originally faux bois (painted wood pattern), I could see some of it on the grate. Must have looked crazy with the grate painted to look wood.

The framing, plumbing and electrical are done on the powder room. I had a couple scary moments plumbing, I was using a piece of metal for a heat shield, and still managed to lit the joist on fire. It went out easy enough, the pipe was so tight in there, I couldn't get a piece of drywall behind it. The electrical went pretty smoothly, I still have to get a fan, it's wired, so I can put it in when I'm ready. It seems like it'll be a little difficult to vent though. Should start drywalling tomorrow, or the next day.

Down to the wood

All the trim in the hallway that is. All the paint is gone, Deb heat gunned the last of it off last night. I've been sanding it all down, and I put the pieces that we took off, back on. It looks like we're entering the home stretch on the hallway, it could all be varnished by the end of the weekend. Of course, it still won't be completely done (when is anything ever done). We still need to strip 3 doors, put another coat of paint on the walls, refinish the floors, and replace some of the trim that's the wrong species right now (I think it's yellow cedar, instead of fir). I need to figure out the air intake for the furnace too, it's make of fir, put it's in poor condition. Either we need a new one that's the same, or something else that looks period. All the new ones are super ugly. It's just nice to have all the paint off of that trim.
I tried to order the concrete counter top supplies again today, not having the best luck dealing with Cheng. We have to fax the order, since it's international. It's been over a week, and I haven't heard anything back, so I refaxed the order.
I'm still recovering from some minor burns from the plumbing foray on the weekend. Dropping hot solder on your arms isn't a good idea. Either is touching the pipe just after you've soldered it (it stays hot for a long time). Hopefully by the end of the weekend, the plumbing for the powder room will be roughed in. I added shut off valves to the laundry sink, since we didn't have them before. Now I can shut it off so I can finally fix the washers.

Final Energuide preparations

We had a snowboarding day at work on Friday, so we all got to go snowboarding on the company's dime. So Saturday started out a little slow. I mainly worked on caulking all the cracks in the bead board ceiling in Seth's room. That probably only took an hour to do, and most of that time seemed to be moving toys out of my way, so I could work. We have to repaint the ceiling now, since there's white stripes of caulk everywhere.

Sunday was plumbing day. I bought a MAPP gas torch, since I heard they were so much better. It's a self igniting one too, so it lights every time you press the button. For some reason, somebody thought it would be good idea to put the plumbing right against the concrete wall. since I'm working in that area, and the spigot is there, I added a frost free anti-siphon spigot. I haven't done a lot of work soldering copper, so I was a little nervous. I know enough people that can bail us out if we run in to problems though, and of course we ran in to problems. And I did run in to problems, it turns out that it is important to open every fixture to drain the lines. I thought the pipe was empty enough, I guess not. So my father in law came out and brought his fancy acetylene torch, and his flux and solder, which seemed to be better as well. So now we had water back to the house. He left me with the rest to do myself, which is good, since I really want to learn to do this. I read in my plumbing book again, how to solder. I'd already cleaned everything really well, I think it was just the water in the bottom of the pipe. The 5 or 6 joints I did for the spigot worked perfectly, so I was really happy.

It was supposed to rain all weekend, and the sun was out, so before adding insulation to the last bay on this wall, I added an outlet for the driveway. I bought all the stuff the night before, a gfci recepticle, cover etc. I got the outlet in, it's not connected yet though. I filled all the cracks outside on the wall with fire resistant silicone, around the spigot, the electrical service etc. We're going to have to repaint that wall anyway, so it's not so bad that I made a bit of a mess. Now I just have to finish insulating, and we're mostly done. I only have one day left, the inspection in on Tuesday.