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.