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!