Steps forward and steps back

The last few days have been a flurry of activity. We have outdoor lights and outlets and they painted the concrete. We did our best to match the roof gray, to avoid having a lot of extra grays since we already have competing tones in the siding and the deck. It's hard to tell how well we did. We picked Benjamin Moore's Deep Space which looks very neutral gray in the swatch but seems a tad blueish to us in person. We had to pick relatively quickly so did not have a chance to test it out with a larger swatch:

Even this picture of foundation concrete, metal roof, and paint swatch shows a very neutral gray, and. yet the foundation definitely gives off blueish vibes. 

Inside, we have a ceiling fan now, with a proprietary down-rod. We loved this Generation Lighting Orbis fan (52'') and of COURSE it apparently had to have an incompatible down-rod diameter to every standard "just grab one off the shelf" one. So we had to special order it. We picked up a 2' and a 3' rod. And then the box with the 2' rod in it was...empty! I guess 3' it is! We also have our hardwired smoke detector and all our recessed lighting. We have also discovered that our vault is high enough that we need to find a new ladder for if we have to actually reach any of these things...

Moving to the walk-in closet area, I got my cute little chandelier and the units have been built-in and painted (some discrepancy over the doors being painted to match so they could blend in with the wall--which we wanted, given that we just received a hefty price tag to do that so...we'll be doing that part ourselves). Still, forward progress!

Our powder room finally got a sink today:

And our shower room got overhead lights in the shower and the heated towel rack. There's an issue with the Kohler valve that is BEHIND THE WALL. The plumber says it is leaky and so we're working with Kohler to get a replacement. Which will mean having to bust through the wall and replace it (they claim they can go in from the drywall side at least, and not the tile side). And you can see a hole cut into the wall near the ceiling for the shower lights installation that will need mudding. So many walls to mud and remud...

And so we're making progress. It seems like there is always a step back for every few steps forward, but we are undoubtedly moving forward. I am so ready for this project to be done!

A Pause

The pause in my posts is directly related to the fact that there simply has not been much to share. In late March, we had a slew of specialist contractors come to put in all the infrastructure that we need in the space. Plumbers came through and ran the pipes for our toilet...

...And sinks. Here's the shower room:

And the toilet room (which actually will need to be rerouted, since we failed to tell our contractor that we planned to have medicine cabinets, so the recessed box will have to go where the pipe currently is):

The HVAC team brought in our Mitsubishi Hyper-Heating mini-split (I don't know about you, but that brand makes me think of cars and not HVAC units--but apparently they make quite good systems!) and loaded it into the encapsulated crawl space. Then the next two days consisted of running the ductwork after consulting us about where we'd like everything to go. Since the HVAC unit is under the floors, most of our vents are low to the ground (except the return, which is up high since hot air rises and it usually sucks out hot air, though this is a year round system that also provides heat). In the bedroom, our vents are on the floor. In the bathroom(s), they are on the walls just above the floor. In our closet area, one will be coming out of the bottom of our built-in closets. One vent (into the toilet room):

Floor vents in the bedroom:

Return, in the hallway:

After a long walk-through to confirm where we wanted switches and plugs based on both the blueprint and last minute preferences (like how high we want the ones in the bathroom shelving units, etc.), the electrician ran the wiring to all the things. Here's the wall our bed will be on:

One aspect I hadn't realized as we committed to a heated towel rack, steam shower, AND radiant flooring is how many control units we will need on the wall. Here's the wall of the toilet room, looking through the hallway to a similar set up on the wall of the shower room.

The electrician also started getting things set up for our recessed lighting and a box for mounting a ceiling fan:

And got the wiring set up for our outdoor lighting:

They also installed a subpanel in the basement (picture later when it looks more like a real working electrical box and less like an empty box with some random dangling wires). 

The framers also came back to put the hardware in for our panel doors (the metal bits):

That, all together, took us to the end of March. I'm including a lot of detail now but honestly was planning to just gloss over all that stuff. So why haven't we had any updates in April. Because WINDOWS.

We're at a standstill until our windows arrive and they are supposed to be ready this coming week. I know this is a huge improvement over the multi-month waits during the pandemic, but I'm still impatient to get moving, since construction stopped 3 weeks ago while we just...wait. The next step is dry wall and that can't happen until windows (and an inspection, apparently). There's an additional complication--the patio door and transom windows above it won't be ready until June. Usually that's also required to pass this inspection. Our contractor is keeping his fingers crossed that we can get an "all but the doors" inspection to keep going with the construction. Because otherwise we're on hold until June. So...yeah, that's fun.

An update to our last post on metals - we took the safer route and returned to our preferred brushed nickel. After our contractor scared us away with a comment of "no one is asking for gold anymore" (something we don't think is true but was enough to spook us), we realizing we did not want to play into a fad. We know we like silvers and were struggling to match everything anyway, so brushed nickel it is. At least it will match the rest of the house.

Two pinholes for the price of...two

A couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday, I came home to find some moisture on the wall outside the access door where our main water line comes into the house. That didn't seem good. Fortunately, it also wasn't bad, just a little damp

If you look at the lower edge of the door, you can see the water stain. Whatever was causing the problem, I'd obviously caught it shortly after it started. I couldn't see an obvious problem, so I put out some bowls to see if they would gather water.

They didn't. The problem was even smaller than we thought. A tiny pinhole in this cap--sometimes it dripped, and sometimes it sprayed a very fine spray. Minor but annoying problem.

A plumber was able to come the next day, Friday, to replace the cap. He said it was slightly too big and had been filled up with solder to seal. It managed for years, apparently, but the stress of being the wrong size--he thought--probably finally caused it to leak. Easy fix.

Fast forward to later that night, as we were about to brush teeth and go to bed. We entered the bathroom and:

Yeah....it was going to be a long weekend. Not picture is the part where we stabbed this giant water-filled paint bubble with a knitting needle and let it drain into a bucket. You can see in this picture above that while most of the water collected in what was already an annoying air bubble in the paint from literally when we first moved in, it also had seeped into other areas where two drywall pieces met, near the upper right corner of the picture.

So instead of going to bed on time, we started pulling off pieces of paint and drywall from the ceiling. Totally normal Friday night--isn't this how you spend yours?

We couldn't see much up there, but there were clearly older and stickier areas to both the electrical wiring and the copper pipes. By this time, we'd gone back down to the water main and turned off the water to the house as well.

For some reason, there was a LOT of insulation in our ceiling. Since this is the area between the first and second floors, it doesn't seem particularly helpful for energy efficiency. The only thing we can think of is that the contractors put it in when doing the second floor bathroom. We had said to insulate everything, but I guess we assumed "outer wall" was implied.

Once everything was cleared away, we were fortunately able to find the leak quickly--ANOTHER pinhole leak. The hole this time was on the top of the pipe and dripping out everywhere, but D was able to use some plumbers tape to reduce the leak and at least direct it down. For the rest of the weekend, we were able to catch the drips in a pyrex measuring cup on one of the wooden crossbeams. We turned off the water to the house when we went to bed, but could run it, under supervision, during the day. Of course we failed to get a picture of that phase.

Then the following Monday, the plumber came and charged us a lot of money to replace about a 4-inch piece of copper pipe. He had to cut the beam to get to it, but that beam seemed to just be there to help hold up drywall.

And so this has been our view now for just over a week, with a hole over the sink. I'm so glad the leak is fixed but this is not the most lovely sight. Someone came out to give us estimates on the drywall replacement and thought that quite a lot of it is soggy and needs to be replaced. So we're going to redo the whole ceiling. The silver lining here is that the ceiling in the shower stall is going to get replaced too, which means we'll finally be rid of those annoying bubbles in the ceiling from over a decade ago. So...yay? I guess.

Work starts tomorrow. Fingers crossed for a smooth repair. We're also trying not to think too much about how we just had two pinhole leaks in 24 hours because well what's the point in that?

The cup overflows

When J went to the basement, she heard some odd dripping noises. She asked me whether something was wrong with the dehumidifier. I headed into the basement and quickly saw the problem.

The drain at the base of the exterior stairs to the basement had clogged. With the endless rain we have been getting, water had gotten high enough to go over the sill and creep into the house. I took this photo after I spent a couple of minutes with the very useful bilge pump to get some water out. I did get sprayed several times before setting it up correctly. Crucially, I had to put a log over the hose so it wouldn't flop into my face.



After doing that I could get most of the water out in about five minutes. The problem was that in 10 minutes, the water filled back in again. Water apparently was seeping through the walls.

I was putting so much effort into the pumping because it was very uncomfortable to stand on the stairs while trying to manipulate the snake. I first tried the toilet auger, because the clog usually is in the first couple of feet. But I couldn't make any progress. I then moved onto the 25 foot snake. After I ran about 10 feet into the drain with no effect, I decided to call a plumber. I then tried the auger again. Not working. By now the water had filled up to the sill again, so I re-drained it with the bilge pump. Seriously, it is amazing. Buy one if you ever think you need to drain something quickly by hand. The plumber still had not shown up, so I decided to try the snake until he showed up. Well, I beat the plumber.

I have not measured it yet, but I think it took about 15 feet of snake to clear the clog. Ugh. I think I may buy a drill powered snake to speed the process up in the future. It's a huge pain to hand feed that much.

The other plumbing project

I've been complaining about the faucet in our main bathroom sink for a while now (one of those links goes back to 2012...). The handles pointed in the wrong direction, the stopper didn't hold water in the sink, and then a few months ago, the faucet started dripping and our elegant solution was to put a plastic tub in the sink to collect the water for plants.  I was really ready to say goodbye to the fixture.

We'd heard it was easier to replace the faucet structure within the same brand. For a while, we couldn't even figure out what it was, until my mom was visiting and managed to see a tiny "GROHE" on the very back next to the plunger. Bad branding, if we can't figure out what it is when we were trying to!

So after trying to decide between Kohler and Moen, we decided to go with Grohe. Grohe Parkfield, to be specific - it was relatively cheap and relatively stylish. We stuck with chrome to go with the other finishes in the bathroom.

And it remained in this state for a few weeks as we tried to build up enough courage and find the time to take apart the pedestal sink. Until...

Until our garbage disposal broke. It pushed us over the edge to deciding to hire a handyman. And in retrospect, I think it was a sign. We definitely made the right decision by getting someone else to take care of this.

The garbage disposal repair took about 75 minutes. This one, however, took a professional about 3 hours to complete, including multiple trips out for a special tool to remove the bolts. Plus we bought a faucet kit that came in lots of tiny little parts instead of others that come partially preassembled. He actually had to charge us a little extra because of all the time it took to put together.

Yeah, I don't really think we would have had the time and know-how to have done this ourselves...

Apparently the sink wasn't bolted in to tension before and must have just hand-tightened it. The sink always felt a little wobbly. Now though, it's definitely attached.

Look how pretty! The handles point in the right direction! The stopper holds in the water! There's no drip! And the flow is so much better!

It is fabulous. I'm sad we didn't do it sooner. And I think it was worth every penny to have someone else do it for us.

Our new handyman spent almost a whole day here with these two projects. And it was a busy day. We didn't take pictures but we also had a furnace guy here to clean out the furnace. It had been over two years since we had it cleaned out last and wanted to make sure it was in good condition for this winter. The good news is that apparently it was still pretty clean and we could have gone one extra year before getting it cleaned out. Though there was a lot of cat hair inside that we should vacuum out. Good to know!

A Hairy Situation

I have long hair. It likes to escape down the drain when I shower and the new drain cover didn't do a very good job of stopping it. So every few weeks D has to do a minor unclog. He's become quite the plumber and insists that he doesn't mind. And it only takes him a few minutes.

Recently, however, we had a clogged drain that resisted all of our "quick" attempts at unclogging (mostly all related to the miraculous Zip-It). When that didn't work, D pulled off all of the drain hardware and used an actual plumbers' snake to try to fix the problem. Still no luck. Our temporary solution was to switch to using the other shower and wait until we had more time to deal with it (we avoid chemical drain cleaners because of the fumes and our fear that they will eat through our very old pipes).

That worked pretty well until I decided to fill up the sink in the bathroom to do some hand wash laundry and then let it drain all at once. It would seem that the sink and tub were connected enough that letting a sink full of water go down the drain sent a back-up of sludge into the tub. Oops!

Fast forward past the part where we scrambled for towels and did quick damage control on most of the gunk.

Because D had removed the drain, the pipe wasn't fully connected to the tub and the water back-up allowed water to drain past the pipe and into the walls. Fortunately we have an access panel in our bedroom to get to the leak. It very nearly filled up the little plastic container we managed to shove in to catch the leak (most of the leak - some got onto the wood, so we kept the panel open for quite a while with a box fan circulating the air).

Waiting until we had more time to deal with the clog stopped being an option. We were dealing with the clog "now" (which, of course, wasn't a very good time, but isn't that always the case?).

Step one was to use plumbers' putty to reseal the area around the pipe and to reinstall the hardware, to prevent any potential back-ups from going into the walls again. Next, since obviously the clog seemed to be affecting the sink area as well as the tub, D turned to the sink for his next attempt to snake out the clog.

Back when we had a major clog in our basement utility sink, D bought a 25-foot plumbers' snake. It has certainly paid for itself (all $20 or something) in saved plumber costs and this time was no exception. D was able to snake almost the entire 25 feet from this spot and managed to pull out a wad of hair (I'll spare you the pictures of that one). He wasn't able to access it from the tub area but evidently this angle did the trick.

D has been saying for a year that he doesn't mind doing a little unclogging every few weeks, but I never liked that solution (and even included it on our honey-do list this past September). This time I convinced him that the old drain hardware wasn't working. For every few minor unclogs, there could be a major one as well. So we explored Home Depot and eventually came on the simplest solution:

We didn't go through the whole ordeal of putting in a stopper mechanism up at the overflow vent, but we were able to install the new grate without a screw by just enlarging the center hole and popping it on the existing bolt. So that makes it easy to pop off and replace with the original stopper (currently sitting on the little ledge in the upper left of the picture). And now most of my hair doesn't go down the drain and is easy to wipe away. Hopefully we can avoid such a dramatic clog for a while now.

Days 3 and 4: Plumbing, Electric, and Backerboard

Two noisy days later and we're still in the early stages of the remodel. Yesterday they moved the GFCI outlet away from the switches, closer to the vanity, and they put up backerboard on the vanity/toilet wall.

Today they plastered the seams on that wall and pulled out the old insulation from the exterior wall.

We also got our first hint of what the bathroom will look like when they brought in our pretty new tub! No more pink!

There was a tiny setback last night when we noticed some new copper plumbing extending up to where a typical shower head should be installed, despite the fact that we are getting a special slide bar system with the water hose offset to the side. A quick call to the designer to check in and today the plumbing was rerouted to its proper location off to the left:

One additional (more costly) setback--the vent fan on the ceiling has been removed to reveal that there is no duct work venting to the outside. The fan is just pulling the humidity into the attic. Building a pipe to the outside was not included in our contract but it was something we anticipated we might need, so now we just have to find out how much our crew will charge for the additional labor and materials and decide what to do.

By now our team of contractors have almost completely taken over the extra room to store materials and cut them to size. They put up plastic to protect the few pieces of furniture we have in there, but I'm really glad we've kept that room mostly empty and unpainted..

*******

On a completely unrelated note and in response to a comment from this post, here is my adorable King Kong kitty doing his best beached whale impression. You can see how the fat rolls completely envelop the poor villagers.