Category: Random Projects

Small to-do items that aren’t part of a larger project

Cold Weather Blues

January 29, 2016 / Matt / 0 Comments

Last year one of our primary goals was to finish the basement before winter. At a minimum we wanted the floor poured because it will have radiant heating. That way we could get the water heater and the washer and dryer into the heated basement. Because of the plumbing delays none of that happened, so everything is still on the unheated first floor. Knowing the risks (from previous year mishaps), we put heating cable on the new water main that runs down the beam in the basement and insulated it. The pipes in the first floor already have heating cable and insulation from previous years.

We’ve been fortunate to have a fairly mild winter this year, but we had a cold snap earlier this month and the first casualty was the water heater. We have a high-efficiency condensing gas water heater that I really like, even if a wall-mounted inline water heater would have been more convenient, given our basement renovations. Unfortunately, the condensing aspect means there is a drain line at the bottom of the exhaust vent. It’s a plastic tube that wraps around the water heater at near-floor level and out a hole in the side of the house. It’s supposed to go to a floor drain, but since the water heater is temporarily on the first floor, it’s draining outside. That drain line froze, so the water backed up and blocked the exhaust vent. When I tried to melt the ice with a heat gun I melted the tube. When I tried to disconnect the tube I broke the connector to the vent and cut up my hand on a sharp sheet metal edge. I managed to replace the connector and the tube and so far it’s been fine.

The second casualty was the washing machine. Two years ago the water inlet and valve assembly in the washing machine froze and cracked and we had to replace it, so since then we’ve been careful to drain the lines when it gets cold. Last year we had some bitterly cold days and managed to get through without issue. This year I thought I was being clever by turning off the water and then starting a fill cycle on the washing machine to drain the lines instead of unscrewing the hoses at the back. As it turns out that wasn’t clever and the assembly froze and cracked again.

The third issue was the next day when we got home from work and the cold water wasn’t working on the second floor. Apparently, even though all the pipes are insulated and heated all the way up to the second floor, the inaccessible area in the second floor wet wall got cold enough to freeze. I used a heat gun in the bathroom and got it flowing again.

This past Saturday, still waiting for the replacement washer part, Sarah got home to discover a torrent of water spraying all over the basement and the front yard! When we got the new water service, we asked the plumbers to install a spigot at the front of the house. When I installed the heating cable and insulation on the main, I skipped over this small branch line. Apparently it froze, but didn’t leak until it melted when the temperatures warmed up. The joint between the spigot and the copper pipe popped free. I had to turn off the water at the meter, run to Home Depot and buy a valve, and install that on the branch line. That way we can at least turn off and drain the branch. Later that day the new washer assembly arrived and I got that installed as well.

We’re hoping the coldest weather is behind us. The latest update on the plumbing is that if they can get the permit by today, they can repair the sewer tap by mid-next week. What that means for the timeline on the re-lining isn’t clear, but I’m guessing we’re looking at the end of February. I still need to clean up the weeping trench in the basement, but there hasn’t been any urgency on that.

Back Yard Cleanup

May 1, 2014 / Matt / 0 Comments

Our back yard has been collecting material from the house. First we excavated the new footings in the basement, which resulted in a large mound of clay. Then, between the chimney removal and removing the brick fire blocking during subfloor install we added a giant pile of bricks and mortar. We removed the mortar from all of the good bricks and stacked them in a neat cube, but the broken and crumbling bits we just piled next to it.

Clay, bricks, mortar (and Derek)

In addition, we had an old raised garden along one side of the yard. It wasn’t the lovely cinder blocks that made us want to get rid of it now so much as the dirt itself: full of shredded plastic bags from rats nests, broken glass, bottle caps, an oil filter, bullet slugs, you-name-it. Sarah wouldn’t plant vegetables in it, so we used separate planters. She was planning to put a shovel-full of dirt into our garbage toters every week, but that was going to take forever. Instead we decided to get another dumpster (#4 if you’re counting).

Our beautiful garden (and Derek)

An added incentive to take out the garden sooner rather than later was that the wooden fence was bent into the neighbors yard because the dirt was piled directly against it. The small suspended fence you see above was screwed to the posts of the larger fence behind it.

Piles cleanup up

In addition to cleaning out all the clay, mortar, and broken bricks I shrink-wrapped the stack of bricks to make it a bit safer for Derek to be around. I don’t want anything to fall on him if he tries to climb on it. We were supposed to get a 10 yard dumpster for heavy debris, which is fairly short. I was hoping to make a simple ramp so that I could dump wheelbarrow-fulls into it. Instead they brought a 15 yard dumpster and said not to fill it up all the way. That meant it was too tall for a ramp and I had to instead carry three or four buckets in the wheelbarrow and then empty them over the side one by one.

Garden removed and fence fixed

The dumpster was delivered midday Thursday. By midday Friday I was exhausted, so Sarah came down and filled the buckets while I carried them out. The work went faster and it was a lot easier than doing all of it (not counting Derek’s assistance). We finished up Saturday morning, though the dumpster was blocked by a car and they wound up not picking it up until Monday. I’m interested to find out how many tons it wound up being.

Dumpster nearing the "two-thirds full" line

Dumpster approaching the “two-thirds” limit

We’re excited to have our back yard opened up a bit. With all the crap we’re doing to the house, the back yard —ugly as it is— is one of our favorite places. We didn’t have much of an outdoor space of our own at our condo. Having room for a table and chairs, a fire pit, a sandbox, and room for some small garden beds and compost bins still feels like a treat. Our other impending cleanup activity is the scrap metal pile in the basement. That won’t entail a dumpster, but like this will be a lot of work. Our house has more tons of material to disgorge before everything’s said and done.

Expected Plumbing

April 30, 2014 / Matt / 0 Comments

We’ve encountered several plumbing projects since buying the house that were not part of our planned renovations but rather part and parcel of living in an old house. We had the pinhole leak in our hot water pipe, the replacement of our bathroom faucet, and the abrupt collapse of part of our kitchen drain, and I didn’t bother chronicling the recent kitchen faucet swap (the cheap faucet we bought when we moved in started leaking and we got a less cheap replacement). All of these were sudden and unexpected, but the basement drain problem was not. It had been progressively worsening for some time and we had been progressively ignoring it. Well, no longer.

Emily

Almost two weeks ago our daughter Emily was born (explaining the brief gap in new posts). We’re very excited to have her with us, but it means we’re back on the cloth diaper regimen, which brings me back to the basement drain. Let me explain how our sewer is set up. Our house has two sewer systems: the black water sewer that serves the toilet, tub, and bathroom sink and drains via 4″ cast iron pipe into the city sewer, and a gray water sewer for the kitchen sink and laundry that drains via a 2″ cast iron pipe, increasing to a 6″ clay pipe under the basement floor where it picks up a couple of floor drains before heading into the catch basin in the back yard, where it is joined by gutters and the patio drain. From there it can drain into the city sewer as well. Chicago is one of the bastion cities of combined storm and sanitary sewers. The catch basin is a combination grease trap and local water reservoir to help the city handle the water volume during heavy rains. So we have a manhole behind the back porch (under our grill) and a big brick vault about seven feet deep.

Starting at some point several (six?) months ago, when we ran the dishwasher or the washing machine, water would violently spray out of the top of the drain for the washing machine in the basement. To prevent this, I removed a small pvc screw plug from the basement floor. Now water didn’t spray out, it simply welled up out of the floor and drained to the other floor drain in front of the washing machine. This, in turn, also eventually filled and backed up. Then, during the melt from all the snow this past winter, water started to fill the landing at the bottom of the basement steps, about 6″ deep. Sarah put some bricks into the water to use as stepping stones to get into the basement. It was getting pretty bad.

Removed plug: better than spraying water

I bought a drain snake, and then I bought a bigger one. As if the problems hadn’t been bad enough, because we’d now be washing cloth diapers, I really didn’t want the water backing up anymore. The water was also pooling at the base of our (very expensive) new hot water heater and I didn’t want it to start rusting.

Previously repaired connection

I bought a cheap USB camera on a 45′ cable to try and figure out what was under the floor. I researched old Chicago sewer systems online. After running snakes down various pipes and floor drains for two days straight, Sarah cut off the already broken PVC fitting just above the floor while I rented a power drain snake from Home Depot. Having direct access to the clay pipe meant that I could now confirm my fear: the snake was pulling up thick, goopy, mud. That’s a fairly sure sign that the clay pipe under the floor has either separated or outright collapsed. Since I wasn’t prepared to start jack hammering the basement floor, I just snaked all the drains as well as I could, put together new PVC connections (including a clean out) at the base of the drain pipe, and called it a day.

New and improved connection

So far, nothing has backed up since then, so our efforts were not entirely in vain. I still need to clean up all the mud down there. However, I’m not convinced that our current state will last as long as we were hoping. We’re planning to dig down the whole basement floor and replace all of the underground plumbing at the same time. My current timeline put that a ways out (aka years). It may turn out that we can’t wait that long.

Unexpected Insulation

December 9, 2013 / Matt / 0 Comments

It’s a very cold December now, and we still don’t have heat. We’re subsisting on electric radiators, both oil-filled and baseboard. However, it dipped down to 10° over the weekend, and they just weren’t cutting it. When I got up Saturday morning, the thermostat in the living room said it was 53°. Sarah decided that we needed to insulate the attic. She said she would do it, but I’ve heard that song before and I know how it goes. With no insulation to speak of, the little heat we did have was going right out the roof. We don’t plan to remodel the second floor for another year or so, so even once we have real heat we’d still be losing a ton of it.

Not insulated

We debated buying the mineral wool batts we plan to eventually put between each floor, but they’re pretty pricey, and we weren’t sure how well taking them out and putting them back in later would work. Ultimately, we went with blown in cellulose because it was drastically cheaper, plus we had some Menards rebates from buying the subfloor that made it even more affordable. Including the machine rental we were out of pocket about $65, so it won’t take much heat savings to recoup. Sarah and I spent the rest of the morning pulling all of the random boards out of the attic (it’s been weeks since we had a scrap wood pile!). Her parents and nephew Aaron showed up in the early afternoon. There were some unexpected delays in getting everything, though, and we didn’t wind up getting the machine set up at the house until 7 pm. It was crunch time, but fortunately the machine was quick: we blew through 20 bags in 30 minutes. Each bag covers 40 square feet with 6″, rated at R-19.

Insulated

We discovered that in our rush to take out the boards, we had knocked out the kitchen electric circuit, so I had a follow up job of fixing that. I wound up having to replace a length of BX cable over cloth-wrapped wires with one of our newer cable segments from the massive pile in the basement. Unfortunately that necessitated taking down the ceiling fan in the kitchen to get everything re-wired, but that’s all done now. The house is still cold, 64° as of this writing, but it’s not as bad as it was, and hopefully soon we’ll have real heat. The radiators were delivered earlier today, so now it’s all up to Lester (our radiant heating installer). He’s in the basement right now, hooking stuff up.

Unexpected Plumbing, Part 3

August 26, 2013 / Matt / 0 Comments

Saturday we had a bit of a whoops. We had been working on sistering floor joists as part of the wet wall reframe, and hit a stopping point due to an ordered part not being in yet. It was getting into the evening and we had dinner plans at seven. I figured one quick last thing before we wrapped up would be to install a plug in the smaller drain, where the first floor kitchen sink had originally been.

Drain with tee and elbow

It was as simple as unscrewing the existing galvanized line from the cast elbow and putting in the plug. I braced the pipe while Mike unscrewed with the pipe wrench. We first started turning it at the tee, but the pipe wouldn’t clear the floor, so we decided to loosen it at the elbow first. That’s when the tee abruptly cracked.

Broken tee

Crap. The cast iron was completely rotted, most likely due to people putting the wrong stuff down the kitchen sink for too many years. Now we had a dilemma. We needed to fix it quickly, and I didn’t have a coupling for the PVC pipe that the cast iron transitioned to directly below the tee. I did, however, have a brand new, 10′ length of PVC left over from the water heater venting. We measured and realized that not only would it fit, we could also resolve a long standing issue in the basement. The 2″ PVC drain went directly into a 3″ PVC drain in the floor that was cracked. It also had several capped branches on it, all of which could be eliminated.

Basement connection

Check out that beauty! They had put on a side drain for the tub, another side port that required water to travel up for the basement kitchen sink, and the gap where the smaller pipe went into the bigger one was filled with Great Stuff foam that bubbled out every time we ran the dishwasher. Mike ran to the hardware store to buy a reducing coupling and I cut off both the cast iron tee and the top of the 3″ PVC pipe, pulling out all of the existing PVC.

Much better!

Mike got back and we installed the reducing couple and fitted in the new 10′ PVC pipe. With a few inches cut off at the top, we reused the rubber couple to join it back to the cast iron going up to the upstairs kitchen sink.

Rubber couple

Despite my warnings not to use the sink, Sarah managed to run the kitchen faucet while I was standing under the open pipe and then later poured out part of a 2-liter of pop (fortunately I wasn’t under it the second time). She apologized for forgetting and said she was just hungry. We did make it to dinner, albeit a little late; the sushi was really good!

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