Month: November 2014

Going the Right Way

November 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

We’ve officially changed course. We’re now planning to hold off finishing the first floor and instead focus on the basement. If we can get the basement floor redone along with the below ground plumbing, we can move into the basement and do the whole second floor at one time, which also lets us do nearly all the plumbing, electrical, and HVAC at one time. That will make the rest of the project go faster, which after three years (so far) has become a more important factor. We debated buying another two flat and renting out half of it so we’d have somewhere to live besides the basement, but that would’ve cost a lot up front just to save money on rent and if we wind up needing to borrow money to finish the house it would have complicated things.

I updated The Plan and I’ve been thinking through our next steps. We need to start by cleaning out the basement and re-pointing the brick walls. Then, to make the basement livable, we need to run new electrical and replace the windows. Then we can start breaking up the floor and figuring out how we’ll run the new plumbing. Hopefully we can run some (most?) of the new underground plumbing before we have to move out and disconnect the old stuff, but we won’t know until we can see how the existing stuff is laid out.

One of the challenges is that to dig out the basement we want to tear down the existing garage and back porch so we can get a dumpster into the back yard. We don’t want to tear them down in the middle of winter though, so we’re arranging our tasks to do that a bit later. Another issue is the hot water heater and the water filter. Back when I was shopping for water heaters, I debated getting a tankless unit just so it would hang on the wall and I wouldn’t to worry about it, but since I didn’t we have to disconnect it in order to drop the floor under it. The same goes for the main tank of the water filter. We’ll leave them for last and work around them as much as we can, but it means we can’t completely remove the existing floor before we have to move out.

We want to do everything we can to shorten how long we’ll have to be out of the house, since we’ll have to stay in a hotel or temporary apartment while the new plumbing goes in, the basement floor is poured, and we build the basement bathroom. Once we have a bathroom and a utility sink we can move back in. We’ll move some of the kitchen cabinets down to the basement and set up some temporary partitions for bedrooms. It’ll be cozy, and we won’t have a proper kitchen, but we’ll manage. If nothing else we’ll have a lot of motivation to get cracking on the rest of the house!

Considering the Right Way

November 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

We’re facing a conundrum. We got confirmation from the city that we can pass inspection doing things the wrong way and found a different plumber willing to work with us, so we should be all set to move forward with our plan. Then we started thinking more about the future. We’ve lived in the house for over three years now, and by all accounts we’ve made a ton of progress. That said, it’s taken a long time to get to this point and we have a long, long road ahead. It’s possible that if we did things the right way it wouldn’t take as long, plus it would make several parts of the work simpler. It would still take a long time, but maybe not as long.

Here’s the decision before us: we can continue our current plan and finish the first floor. When that’s done we gut and finish the second floor in two separate phases so we always have a full bathroom. This adds complexity to framing, plumbing, electrical, and HVAC. After that we have to dig out the basement, which involves moving out for a month or two while the water line and sewer are replaced. Then we can finish the outside, the porches, the garage, the attic, the basement, and the landscaping.

The other option is we don’t finish the first floor yet. Instead we demo the back porch and the garage, dig up the basement including the part where we stay in a hotel for a month or so to replace the sewer and water line, then move into the basement. We’d have a full bathroom down there as well as heat, so we could gut and re-frame the entire second floor at one time. Then, since both floors would be open, we could get the HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and spray foam done for the whole house rather than in pieces. After that’s done we could finish the first floor followed by the second, with the remaining projects proceeding as in the first option.

Time estimates are incredibly speculative, and there’s no real way of knowing how long it will take us, but looking at the tasks and how they need to be done tells us the second option could potentially save a lot of time, possibly a year or more. Demoing and framing the second floor all at once with the first floor still open would be much simpler. Running the ducting all at one time through open walls would be significantly easier and avoid potential problems. It would also eliminate the complications of attaching to existing plumbing while supporting new plumbing. All of these things being easier and simpler translates to cheaper and faster while likely giving us a better end product.

There’s a catch, of course. We’d have to live in the unfinished basement for an indeterminate amount of time likely measured in years. Instead of a finished first floor next year, we probably wouldn’t have it for two or three. While we were in the basement there would be no kitchen and no bedrooms. Most likely we’d set up some sort of partitions, but it would be smaller than our current space on the second floor and much less comfortable (radiant floor heat aside). It would mean not having a garage for the foreseeable future, not being able to entertain friends and family, not being able to cook, and not having a dishwasher.

Finally, it would mean spending a lot of money sooner than we thought. The advantage of getting all the plumbing, electrical, radiant heat, air conditioning, and spray foam done at once turns into the disadvantage of having to pay for all of them at once, and in rapid succession. We haven’t reached a decision yet. We’re mulling the two options, looking for other alternatives, and trying to decide what will work best for us.