Finally Plumbed

Well, that was annoying!

I finally got the plumbing for the shower finished! Please hold your applause! I know it's an incredible victory, but it did not come before many failures!

You may remember this photo (left) from my last blog entry. It was the triumphant photo I took of what I thought to be the finished product (of the plumbing at least), only to have it spring a leak in what was probably the worst and most expensive location possible. At the rough-in valve. Because I'm not brave (or stupid) enough to try and disassemble everything, clean it, and try it again, it meant I had to buy all new components for a pretty fair chunk of what I did! On top of that I came to find out that I reused a few components that I shouldn't have also.

So, after cutting out the mistake areas, I ended up with this. (Right) D'OH! Short story even shorter, I got everything installed without a hitch! It holds pressure perfectly and because I'm such a pro at sweating copper now ;-), it only took me a couple hours to get everything cut and soldered into place. On Sunday the fun began! I picked up a new tool...the kind that can easily lop off a finger in the blink of an eye (the best kind :-D). Not to mention a gnarly blade for it that eats cement board for breakfast! (Yes, I photoshopped the blade into the photo because I neglected to take a picture of it.) If you're doing any tiling and need to cut Hardie backer board, DUDE this is the blade for the job! I mean, it's called a HardieBlade for cryin' out loud. It cuts Hardie cement board like a hot knife through butter. I also got to use my new Porter Cable rotary cutting tool with a cement cutting bit to cut out the hole for the toilet flange and water line in the backer board for the floor.

This felt like a huge win for me because I finally met my goal from two weekends ago. Pretty soon, I'll be laying tile down. Pretty exciting! Plus it was the first real progress I'd made in two weeks. Set backs are so annoying when weekends are the only days you have to work on a project like this.

More to come soon! Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Forgot to mention a nifty little fix I was given by suggestion from my Dad. Since the length of pipe going up to the showerhead elbow from the valve was kind of long, the showerhead would've felt wobbly even though the elbow was screwed to a stringer at the top. So I ran another stringer behind the pipe about mid way up and used some plumbers tape to fasten it to the stringer. To prevent electrolysis (which my Dad reminded me about, Thanks Dad!) I cut a small piece of the rubber shower membrane and jammed it between the tape and the copper! The showerhead is going to be solid as a rock, now!

The Past Two Weeks

As I said in my last post, two weekends ago I put drywall back up on the studs. So here are a few pictures I took from that. I got to use my new rotary cutting tool to cut out the openings for the light switches and the duct register. Boy does that tool make a difference!
Also, I found what I believe to be a mistake on the builder's part that I had to monkey around with. The sewer exhaust pipe that runs up the wall and out the roof runs up the wall behind the toilet in this bathroom. Again, who am I to question the contractors since I'm not in any construction related profession, but seriously...is that pipe really supposed to protrude from the studs like that? I'm guessing not. It makes putting up drywall pretty tough. I ended up having to bend a piece of drywall about a 1/4" over the pipe. Initially I thought maybe it was due to general shifting and settling of the house over 30 years of existence, but then I realized the builders cut the floor a considerable distance around the pipe which leads me to believe otherwise. Whatever, not that big a deal.

On to this past weekend! I failed to meet my goal this weekend, big surprise there, but hey I'm a computer nerd. I mean what do you expect? What I did get done is the plumbing for the shower. Sorta...

I bought this low profile pipe cutting tool. An absolute must have for jobs like this where room to work is scarce! Chopped off the old valve, not before I turned the water off to the house of course, and got started with reengineering the plumbing to work with our new single handle valve fitting. This was not my first experience with sweating copper, however it was my first time doing it on my own. So I took my time and tried to do it right. The first thing I had to do was move the water hammers down. You'll probably notice the plumbers tape on either end of the old valve. The person who plumbed this shower used that instead of nailing a stringer between the studs and mounting the valve to the stringer because they put the water hammers too high on the pipes such that they were in the way of where the stringer would've gone. Brilliant! Needless to say, I wasn't about to do a repeat of that so I trimmed back the water lines and put things where they should be. By the end of Saturday I believed I had everything plumbed and in place, so I turned the water back on to the house. Everything seemed to be holding the pressure well...for about 3 minutes. A hairpin leak started at one of the gate valve joints! D'OH! Luckily it happened on the closed side of the valve, so I could still shut the water to the shower off without having to turn off the water to the house.

On Sunday, I got a replacement gate valve and fixed the leak. It looked to me like everything was hunky dory! I turned the water back on to the shower and sat and watched it for a few minutes. A seeping leak developed on the cold water line. Curses! I think it's worth mentioning that the two joints that developed leaks are two of the first four joints I soldered together. Since a plumbing problem would be a total bear to fix once this bathroom's finished, I'm going to cut out those first joints and redo them. After I did those joints I finally started to get a feel for it, So, I'm confident the rest of the joints I did are water tight.

"Late"st Headlines

Howdy faithful followers. I'm sorry it's been almost two weeks since I posted anything new about the bathroom remodel. The only thing I accomplished last weekend was putting up drywall, hence I wasn't very excited about updating the blog.

This weekend though, I've got ambitious goals again! I hope to get the rough-in valve for the shower faucet installed (which means I get to play with fire :-D) and the cement board for the bathroom floor laid down.

In other news, we survived the storms yesterday 3/15 just fine but the neighboring Village of Dexter had at least one confirmed tornado and a few homes were lost, so keep them in your prayers! In case you didn't see this on my Facebook, I captured a bolt of lightning from the storm with the camera on my iPod.

Mistake is My Middle Name

Howdy folks. Well, this weekend was a little less productive than I'da liked, but what can you do? I know what I'll do differently next weekend, take breaks. By the end of this, some of you will undoubtedly be thinking, "Really, that's all you got done?", but (brace yourself, here comes the excuse) I'm still really new at this and don't really know what I'm doing. Not to mention I fly a desk all week, which isn't exactly manual labor.

Saturday, I woke up bright and early around 7am which was mistake #1. Got ready and headed off to pick up stuff we ordered from a couple different Home Depots, S. Canton and Northville. Unfortunately, no one store had enough stock of everything we wanted...go figure right? I got home around 10ish, unloaded all the stuff I bought and no, that picture isn't of everything I bought. It's more like half. By then I was already pretty tired, but I had a goal that I actually thought was achievable, even for me! Build a wall, raised sub-floor for the shower, and lay down some cement board for the floor. So, I got right to work, mistake #2. Should've taken a nap...lol.

I cleared out the garage so I could use it as a workshop and got started building a wall that would accomodate the prefabricated recessed shelf thingamajigs. Mistake #3 was taking The Tile Shop's word for it that these prefabricated thingamajigs were made to fit inside studded walls that were 16" on center. Now, I'm no carpenter or anything, but by golly I know what 16" on center means (my brother would kill me if I didn't) and these things were NOT the right width for a 16" on center studded wall. They were about 2" too short. I measured and cut the studs and put them together centering the two studs that were going to have the shelves nailed to to them. Long story short, I ended up building that stupid wall three times for failure of properly measuring everything before nailing them together.

Mistake #4 was building the wall in the garage and then assuming that a 3x8 foot wall would fit around the banister and up the stairs. With some creativity and a dent or two on the walls later, Cass and I got the wall upstairs. I finagled it into place and grabbed the mini sledge. For having such an unnecessarily hard time with measuring where the studs were supposed to go, I was impressed at how snug the wall fit in place! Perfect! I hammered that sucker into position and got started nailing it in place. Now, at this time I was really hurting. The wise thing to do would've been to take a break and come back to the wall refreshed. However, I was determined to get that wall in place so I grabbed the hammer and nails. You guessed it...mistake #5. If you've ever had to drive nails up into the ceiling joists, you know that it's not a very graceful process. Having to overcome gravity, it usually involves swinging the hammer in the general direction of a nail and hoping you hit it and fatigue happens really fast. Yyyyyeeeeah.

You'd think that since it was now well into the afternoon and I obviously needed to take a break that I would've called it a day. Mistake #6. I wanted to build that sub-floor! How hard could that be? It actually wasn't too bad until I realized that common framing nails are 3 1/2" inches long and studs are 3 1/2" wide. I needed to toe-nail the studs together, which I'm not very good at. Finally I get the frame built and the plywood cut to size only to then realize that I need to cut a hole out for the drain and have no tool for doing so. I should have stopped because it was 7:30 pm and just saved that for Sunday, but I didn't, mistake #7. I went to Lowes and got a rotary tool with a couple bits for wood and cement board, came back, and started cutting out the hole. I finally finished, cleaned up the garage, and put the cars back in around 10pm. 15 hours and essentially never really took a break except to eat lunch and dinner.

Sunday, I installed the subfloor. That was all the energy and pain tolerance I had enough to do. By 4pm, I felt awful. Next week, I'm gonna spread out the work over two days.

Tips for Remodeling Vol. 1

Ok, so I've decided it'd be fun to start posting things that I learn from remodeling for my own reference and to share.

1. When buying new fixtures, shop around! We found a nice shower door that we want and looked at prices at Lowes and Home Depot. The door we wanted was $590 at Lowes and $544 at Home Depot. Then I looked at Menards, $259! WHAT?!? Sure it's a bit of a drive, but guess where we're buying our shower door!


2. Toilet bowls make a really loud noise when you throw them as hard as you can into a big metal dumpster! Just sayin'...




3. Reciprocating saws are evil, DeRanGed power tools that (I'm guessing) were developed by a man who thought that the other existing types of saws didn't give him enough of an adrenaline rush but he also had enough sense to know that a chainsaw would be overkill..... and I LOVE 'EM!


4. Finally, don't expect that the house was built like you think it was and that everything will go as you hope. Just don't, 'cause it won't.