Plumbing

I spent a Saturday wrestling monkey wrenches over my head and broke back the galvanized water pipes to the most convenient joints, and substituted in PEX. I got everything installed, turned the water back on, checked all my joints, and found no leaks at all. Yay!

Then I noticed a drip. Grrr.

Turns out that I had a pinhole leak in a section of the galvanized that I hadn’t even touched. So I got to turn the water off again, heft the monkey wrenches again, and break out another section of galvanized. Luckily, that was the last of the work for the day. There’s still more galvanized, but it can wait until I can buy a manifold and replace it all.

I also ended up having to replace the kitchen sink supply valves (and then the flexible supply lines as well since they were clogged with galvanized pipe-rust), and the PEX-compatible ball valves were so easy to work with I don’t see any particular reason to mess around with copper stubouts and compression valves at all — just run the PEX out of the wall in a chrome sleeve and crimp a valve onto it and you’re all done.

Electrical

Of course, all the plumbing work was in support of putting in a new electrical panel. The guys from Kemly Electric came out and did a great job installing it and putting in the new mast, and then a couple days later the city moved the wires and put in the meter, and Kemly came back and set up the feeder line to the old panel.

I’ve moved the bathroom circuits and the cooktop circuit to the new panel. I suppose I could move the dryer circuit but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. The rest will have to wait until I start renovating rooms.

More Plumbing

Shortly after installing the supply lines, I went to run a load of laundry. I came back later to find the utility sink completely full of water. Apparently the drain had chosen that moment to clog. Since it’s the drain that serves the washing machine, the kitchen sink, and the dishwasher, I needed to fix it immediately.

So I basically rebuilt the entire trap, with long-throw bends and a cleanout, so it won’t clog as much and if it does I can unclog it without having to cut it all out again.

Before

After

Through all the frustration and work, I kept telling myself I was not going to call a plumber, dammit.

That completed, I decided the next day to finally install the new garbage disposal that’s been sitting in a box under the sink for almost a year. Installing it was pretty easy, except when I realized that it was physically larger than the old disposal and therefore the shunt over to the sink trap was at the wrong height.

So I basically had to completely rebuild that trap as well. Sigh. At least it’s now built so that it won’t accumulate ick in the shunt pipe, and I installed an air access valve so at least the kitchen sink now has a vent.

Kitchen disposal and trap rebuild

The neat thing about the garbage disposal is that it’s very very powerful. The damn thing sounds like a tractor engine starting up or something.

I think that’s it. Now on to the stairs…

The plan is to install a new mast and meter in a better location on the house (where the wires won’t cross over the roof at no more than five feet clearance), run conduit back to the same room in the basement as the old panel, install the new panel there, put in a 100-amp breaker and run a feeder cable to the old panel. That way I can leave the horrible mess of electrical spaghetti untouched for now, and as I remodel rooms put new circuits in the new panel and retire circuits from the old panel until I can remove the old panel completely.

Also, the old panel is attached to a stud wall that I’m going to want to remove (well, it’s attached to the beam above a stud wall, but I wouldn’t want to remove the wall and leave the panel just hanging out in open space). The new location will let me reconfigure the walls however I like, and still leave plenty of room on that wall for washer/dryer/utility sink.

Before the electrician can come out, however, I’ve got a lot of work to do to prep the site. There’s a set of stairs from one of our back doors that needs to get detached and pulled away from the house so the conduit can run (I’ll cut a hole and put them back later). There’s a bunch of drywall that needs to get removed to clear a path for the grounding wire to reach the plumbing (at least the plumbing that will be left once I convert everything to PEX). And, most importantly, there’s a couple of water pipes directly over where the panel will go, which is forbidden by code (confirmed with an electrical inspector at the permit department).

So the plan is to cut out those pipes and divert them around the panel location using push-on or compression connectors and 3/4″ PEX. The problem is that they’re embedded in/hidden behind a plaster ceiling one of the previous owners installed in the whole central section of the basement (for fire protection from the furnace maybe? who knows).

Actually, I’m beginning to think that’s not plaster, it’s concrete. This hole took me half an hour beating on it with a crowbar and hammer:

Here’s a closeup, after some of the wire mesh lath has been cut away:

The reason I’m thinking it’s concrete is not only is it really hard but the sawzall will barely notch it (although it’s easy to cut out the mesh and keys once I’ve knocked off the visible layer).

So here’s the plan, before and after:

Hopefully I can at the very least get all the demo done on Saturday, and then I’ll be taking two days off work: the day the electrician comes to let him in and supervise and do any last-minute helpful homeowner things, and the day before to complete the plumbing and remaining demo.

Then the city’s inspection, then the Seattle City Light guy comes out for his inspection, then he schedules a crew for the re-splice to the service wire, and on that day the electrician comes back and makes the final hookup from the new box to the old, and then we have a completed upgrade.

Yay!

This is where things got bad. I was running out of time and the to-do list just kept getting bigger as I discovered step after intermediate step that I hadn’t planned for.

The plan was to finish up the framing, including framing in the hole where the old closet door was and building the stub wall to go at the foot of the tub, then to run the electrical back to the breaker panel, then tap into the existing feed lines and run PEX to the faucet, bath and toilet. Didn’t even come close.

First off, of course, is that I didn’t even get to the house until after 3pm, what with having to run around and pick up supplies, including my busted Craigslist Special circular saw from the repair shop way the hell up in Kirkland (about fifteen miles out of my way). Then I ate a sandwich and finally got to work about 4pm. I called the city and county and scheduled all the inspections for the following day. I was committed now.

Finishing the framing was the easy part — mostly. I filled in the doorway with 2x4s and cut a patch for the 2nd bedroom closet wall where we had to tear it out to get out the old galvanized tub vent pipe. Then my saw up and died — there was power all the way to the handle but no action when I pulled the trigger. Hundred bucks worth of dead plastic and metal. Dammit.

Luckily, I’d purchased a hand saw the day before to make a cut after Nate’s sawzall died, so I got to work manually cutting the studs for the stub wall and the floorboard patch. I think I finished the framing at about 7pm.

Then I turned to the electrical. Now, the whole original part of the house is run off knob and tube, even if there’s romex spliced into it to feed a lamp or whatever. There was a rat’s nest of K&T above the ceiling, so I turned off the power and climbed up the ladder with a flashlight to start figuring out what went where and what could be removed. A whole lot of clipping and wire-nutting later, all the lights and switches were disconnected and the exposed splices and stub ends were safely enclosed in nonmetallic boxes (that I’d bought on Nate’s advice). That was about 10pm.

Wiring the new circuits was complicated. I already knew the breaker panel was full up, and figured out the easiest, cheapest way to extend it. I’d discovered that the breaker panel had a 40-amp double pole breaker for the old electric water heater that wasn’t attached to anything (we have a gas water heater now). Earlier that afternoon, I’d bought a little 60-amp Siemens main lug panel with room for two full-size breakers, a 50-amp breaker for the old box, and a piece of 6-3 wire to connect them. So I pulled the 40-amp breaker, put in the 50-amp breaker, installed the Siemens box on a piece of plywood next to the main box, and ran the connecting wire. (All without ever disconnecting the main power, because Federal Pacific Stab-Lok breaker panels don’t have a main breaker. Jeezus!)

Then I drilled the remaining few holes in the bathroom for the wire (I’d got most of them while Nate was working), put in the boxes for the sconce lights, ran the wire inside the bathroom between the fixtures and the switches, and plotted out the route between the bathroom and the breaker panel. OOPS.

Guess what? Running the wire up and down the walls used up about forty feet of my hundred-foot roll, and I needed about 75 feet to get both circuits back to the panel. So I drilled the necessary holes in the joists and went ahead and ran one of the circuits.

At that point it was 4am and I was dying. We’d brought over a foam pad for Thekla to roll around on when we had her at the house, so I took all the gear out of my pockets and laid down for a three-hour nap.

I woke up freezing at 7am, geared back up, and headed to Home Depot for more wire. I got back about 8am and started running the wire for the second bathroom circuit. Jen arrived about 9am and got right to work on getting the carpet off the stairs, while I got all the ground wires connected together in all the switch and receptacle boxes.

That was it for the framing and electrical, so I got right to work on the PEX. Instead of running multiple parallel lines like you would for a manifold system (which is what I want eventually), I ran a single line and T-ed off it for each fixture. At that point the next step was to shut off the water to the house and cut the lines to tap into them. Unfortunately, the old corroded-together galvanized lines proved impossible for me to budge, so I was in a quandary because I needed to break them back to a fitting to attach an adapter.

At that point the plumbing inspector showed up.

The difference between the DIY reality shows and reality is that the shows never show people covered in filth on top of a ladder working with heavy tools at arm’s length in the middle of the night.

Monday I pulled down the ceiling and dropped a huge pile of rockwool all over everything — I pulled one nail off the corner of each sheet of drywall and the whole thing came down. There were a bunch of nails in the joists, but the drywall must have been completely rotten. After I cleaned all of that up, I scraped up all the vinyl flooring and the linoleum underneath it (at least I hope it was linoleum). Also, the building inspector showed up for the preliminary inspection, and signed off on all our plans, including the stairs; what was especially useful is that he let me know that on old existing buildings they’re understanding about what’s possible and what isn’t, and with respect to the winding stairs that the 6″ inner width of the tread was the most important part and that if we missed the 10″ middle width by a quarter-inch or so they could let it slide.

Tuesday we had Nate the Handyman (colleague of Bob) in to help. I realized that the bathroom and the old closet floor were at different heights, so we stripped it down to the subfloor. It broke my heart to rip up all that 3/4″ thick hardwood floor, but it was so damaged by moisture that there was no saving it. Then we moved the tub, all three hundred pounds of it, out the door onto a piece of cardboard into the parlor.

At this point, Nate did most of the work while I ran back and forth to the hardware store for parts. First he furred out the old closet wall so it wasn’t just 2x4s laid parallel to the wall (leaving a space to get the tub back in). Then we demoed the old tub drain line. Because we were unclear on the requirements, I called a plumbing inspector at the county, who said that the line had to be 2″ pipe, but Home Depot only had 1-1/2″ tub-drain-and-overflow units, and the galvanized nipple sticking out of the cast iron stack was only 1-1/2″, so fine, we’ll make the line in between 2″ and just slap adapters at both ends. This turned out to be a mistake. (See the post after next.)

He cut the hole for the new tub drain and started putting in the trap, and also hung up the overhead light and the vent fan, but unfortunately at that point he’d worked a full day  so I asked him back the next day (oh, my wallet).

Wednesday, he built a bumpout wall against the outer wall because the trap wouldn’t fit otherwise (it would have to go down into the concrete foundation wall). Then he put in the drain line and we moved the tub back in and set it in place. Although that doesn’t sound like a lot, it took most of the day to do. Meanwhile, I was ripping up the subfloor floorboards against the wet wall because they were completely rotten. Last thing we got done was cutting the hole in the roof and installing the vent fan duct. Nate left his near-$1000 bill and went home; I went to Lowe’s for the PEX supplies they don’t carry at Home Depot (and a bunch of other stuff) and then went home.

Thursday, the plan was to do all the electrical and PEX water piping and call for frame, electrical and plumbing inspections for Friday so we could close up the walls this weekend. Didn’t happen. See next post.