Month: January 2012

Plumbing Patch

January 31, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Drain Problem

As with most things in the house, the drain plumbing is atrociously wrong. There’s a cast iron soil stack that’s mostly ok, except it ends in the attic a bit shy of the roof. There’s new PVC that ties into another cast iron soil stack that does make it out the roof, though it has some holes in it. The base of the PVC is cracked off about a foot from the basement floor and has a smaller diameter PVC pipe going into it. It also has some side drains, one of which is broken off.

In the above picture you can see the problem. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, we didn’t have any problems with this until recently. I think it was so caked with dirt that the back pressure never managed to escape. Maybe it was just time, maybe we bumped it during demo or something, but a few days ago we started getting water out of the side drain when we did laundry, hence the soap. However, as you can imagine it didn’t smell like laundry soap. It smelled like festering sewer water, which is exactly what it was.

Because the pipe is snapped off and literally cemented into the ground, there isn’t a clean way to fix it. I tried prying off the outer ring to get something I could screw onto, but didn’t have any luck. I didn’t want to crank too hard on it and wind up with a much bigger problem, so I went to the hardware store and played with the PVC fittings for half an hour, at one point having eight different inter-connected pieces in my hand. I finally settled on four pieces that I could combine into several possible solutions. My past experience with plumbing has taught me to over prepare so I don’t find myself back at the hardware store return counter multiple times in one evening.

Drain repair

There’s a good chance that we’ll need this pipe when we move the laundry back to the basement, so a more permanent seal wasn’t in the cards. I decided on a 2″ to 1-1/2″ rubber gasket adapter, followed by a cleanout and cap. The gap at the top of the pipe that the smaller pipe fits into I filled with spray foam in a bid to prevent gas and possible water from escaping. It’s far from pretty, but like much of what we’ve done to date it’s temporary. It only needs to last a year or so until we come back and re-do it all. I’ll let it all dry out and then run some water through the washer to make sure it doesn’t leak. Then I can sweep up the mess. In the mean time I sprayed the hole thing with a generous helping of disinfectant to hopefully cut the smell. Blecgh.

Basement Demo: Visible Progress

January 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Wall removed

Having a baby definitely makes it more difficult to do rehab, but bad habits are even worse. I can say with certainty that we haven’t made as much progress as we could have, to say nothing of how much progress I’d like to have made by now. Last night Sarah and I tackled the last remaining walls in the basement and vowed to get back into good habits of working on the house regularly. Without good habits this project will never get done.

Missing insulation

Any good session of demo in the house features the usual discoveries of obviously wrong work. In this case we found a couple of gems. Above is a prime example of how insulation was installed throughout the basement. Notice the cavity on the left has none whatsoever, and the cavity on the right has it kind of shoved in. I estimate about 40% of the walls had insulation and about 3% had it installed reasonably well.

Sarah demos

This blurry picture is of Sarah prying the wall off the back of the chimney. The rest of the wall came down as well. This is in what used to be the kitchen, and the other side of the wall is the utility room with the boiler and hot water heaters.

Hole in the chimney

Here’s what we found underneath: a gaping hole in the chimney. This may partly explain the ghastly fumes in the basement that cause us to always wear masks, even now that most of the mold is removed. We blocked it temporarily with a piece of patio block, but we’ll need to improve it to be safe. I was already concerned about carbon monoxide and particulates in the air down there, and this certainly doesn’t help.

We of course have more mess to clean up after our progress, but having a sense of accomplishment is important in trying to establish new habits. With some effort and diligence we’ll get into the rehab groove and it will become automatic.

Basement Demo: Plumbing

January 13, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Hot Water Line

We’ve been tending to a sick baby, so there hasn’t been much time to work on the house. The time I have found has been split among a number of things which makes for small progress. The ever present basement demolition makes the top of the list. I gave my friend Dean a tour of the basement and he lent his sweat soldering tools and skills to a pressing problem: disconnecting the basement supply plumbing. The plumbing runs through the center wall which will be take out to replace the main beam and columns. Getting it disconnected is the first step in removing it.

The basement supply plumbing is copper, while most of the rest is galvanized steel pipe. The hot water had been tapped off of a line that was originally for the laundry. Because we’ll be putting the laundry back in the basement at some point, we needed to disconnect the branches to the basement kitchen and bathroom while leaving the laundry connected. There was a cutoff valve that should have made this easy, but even closed all the way, water was still coming through. I wound up shutting off the whole water heater, which services the second floor. Once that was done, Dean was able to cap these two branches.

Cold Water Line

The cold water line looked simpler but was quite a bit more problematic. Again there was a shutoff valve, and again it didn’t completely stop the water. I vowed to use nothing but quarter-turn valves when I install the new plumbing. The next step was to turn off the water main to the house. Even so, there was still pressure. So we opened some faucets to drain the lines. Surely, now it should be fine? Of course not. This water line was tapped off the supply line to the steam boiler, which meant the low water cutoff valve on the boiler water feeder was opening and allowing water to flow back into the pipe! At this point Dean had a great idea: remove the whole valve. The other side of the cutoff valve we were capping was galvanized, which is threaded pipe. Some twists of the wrench later and we had removed the whole thing. Now, completely free, we were able to solder on the cap. A little plumber’s putty put the valve back on and we were done. The next step will be to pull all the now loose copper pipes out of the basement. I have a bit more electrical to pull out of the ceiling, and then I need to tackle the gas lines. Once that’s consolidated and re-routed I can finally take down the remaining drywall.

Floor Joists

The next thing I worked on was a bit of scouting and measuring, to ensure my floor plans are accurate. While the inspector had told me the floor joists supporting the second floor were 2×6, and the ones in the attic definitely were, I had acquired some doubts. A couple weeks ago I jumped up and down and judged the floor to be fairly stable considering that assumption. The only way to confirm was to rip a whole in the ceiling of the first floor and measure it. We already have a number of holes in the wall, so it was a pretty minor thing. The result was good news: the joists are 2×10! That means all of my concerns about sistering and reinforcing are for nothing. We can just add some better blocking.

Wall studs

I also measured the exterior wall studs. They’re 1 3/4″ thick and 3 3/4″ wide, which is thicker than today’s 2x4s, but not as big as I originally thought. Regardless, I’ve gone back to my floor plans to calculate accurate measurements once we add extra thickness to the exterior walls for better insulation. That work is still in progress, but I’ll share my revised floor plans when they’re ready. My house model is also coming along, in all its 3D fanciness. We’ve been looking at the extravagant examples on Houzz for inspiration on some of the details, and it’s coming along well.