Merry Christmas 2

So another holiday season is upon us, soon to come and go. Another year hung with garlands of 15 amp extension cord, ornaments of carbide tipped saws-all blades, and the flickering lights of an ever failing electrical service. Best wishes as we confidently turn our back on 2007, stride cautiously through 'year 2' and toss ever more coins of vexation into the wishing-well of broken promises that is 809 D street.

Can you take me high enough

Damn Yankees aside... innovative tools can be yours at your local Home Depot Renta-centa - like this gem that does the work of ten men. For the price of a dozen big Mac's Alli could single- handedly raise and fasten 10' drywall to the first floor ceiling. Quite possibly the smartest thing ever made...


General notes on progress are as follows

-shower and lavatory valves installed, removed, reinstalled correctly per mfg instruction, plumbed, tested.
-all shower, bathroom waterproofing installed.

a vision, in cross-linked Polyethylene

The supply plumbing is PEX - a flexible, plastic conduit in designer colors and dimensional sizes. It's like working with a spool of hula-hoops but it's stronger, more flexible, and ultimately much more user friendly than Copper, or CPVC. I got turned onto PEX by the curmudgeon plumbers in Cape Cod on a job a few years ago. It's originally a German product which means it was developed like this



by guys like this



to work like this




it fishes like wire though a retro-fit situation and the 100' lengths make it possible to use very few fittings. The meat-fisted way i've been working means that fewer fittings makes for fewer possible leaks. And this stuff's made with Lasers* - f'ing lasers, so i'm not sweating it.





*PEX-C is produced by the electron irradiation method, in a "cold" cross-linking process (below the crystal melting temperature). It provides less uniform, lower-degree cross-linking than the Engel method, especially at tube diameters over one inch (2.5 cm), and when the process is not controlled properly, the outer layer of the tubes may become brittle. However, it is the cleanest, most environmentally friendly method of the three, since it does not involve other chemicals and uses only high-energy electrons to split the carbon-hydrogen bonds and facilitate cross-linking.

of Chickens Little

the dining room has a dropped ceiling to hide the plumbing chase above. The combination of steel studs and wood framing proved both lighter when working overhead and straighter making it possible to build the whole thing perfectly not-level and not-plumb.

Radiaton Therapy

With the rough plumbing largely behind us, the finish plumbing is now squarely in front of us - first among these is the careful replacement of the radiators which have been camped out in the living room for the past 4 months. These cast iron maidens weigh about 200 lbs and are imobile without the hand truck.




The connections are threaded galvanized pipe - yeilding again to the bigger stick approach of home maintenance.

Living Room Radiator back in place....

Bathroom radiator back in place...

"Applying more Ass" the Bigger Stick approach to galvanized pipe

As rough plumbing lessons go, this has been a good one to learn: If you can't turn the pipe, someone tougher than you will just turn it harder. The mystery and subtle science of screwing, and unscrewing threaded galvanized radiator pipe comes down to one known entity, applying more ass.

Where to begin... The White 1 1/2" painted Pipe shown below is an existing threaded radiator line, this means the joints all screw together one after another to form the hot water supply to the old radiators in our house. in this "before shot" you can see that this existing radiator line drops well below the new waste lines roughed in. if left in place - as it has been for the past century it would mean the pipe would hang below the finished ceiling in the middle of the dining room. Armed with irrefutable logic Alli proposed "just moving it up our of the way"

here's the wall after we cut out a section to remove the lower elbow

and here's the nastiness that came with it
100 years of paint and heat cycles had the pipes pretty well fuzed together. The replacement pipe required new custom lengths cut and threaded - it was during this process that the hardware store plumber advised "if you can't turn it any further, you just have try harder". Note the guest appearance by Jeff Chown in the lower left of the image. Jeff was indispensable help putting this mess back together.

Sewer pipe follow up

The connection to the existing 4" drain is made with a hubless neoprene fitting commonly called a "Fernco" coupling. the plumbers who made this connection made it look impossibly easy - they snapped the existing waste line and were in and out in about 3 hours of time.


the hole has been back filled and the scars gracefully smoothed over...

Behind every great man....

Stands a driven, passionate, and patient, woman. To my dear wife Allison, the glue holding this mess together, I owe all of the credit. She's the first into the hole, the last to put down the tools and the one keeping the sanity when we need a break.

Year end review; a moment of [in]dignity

Well, we've slipped past the anniversary. Year one has come and gone, and being that, at this moment, two men are ripping into our sewer line in the hole we've made in our dining room, the house does not lend itself to a warm and fuzzy before/ after retrospective. In lieu of the candy-coated "look-what-we've-finished" i thought i'd recap some momuments by the numbers.

Dead rats # 18 and still counting.

Yes, we had rats, lots of rats. some dead, some we killed, all of them coming from the church on the corner. Socio-economic reasons aside, the block's relationship with the corner church and it's transient congregation have been on a downward slide since before our time - resulting in the Church's refusal to exterminate its rats nest in its backyard playground. on the upside tihs common enemy has brought the neighborhood together. at least the dogs are on the job.


Holes in the living room floor: 4

See previous post. Propper planning might have had us cutting one big hole - but we've chosen the death by a thousand cuts method instead.


Holes in the Roof: 2

What goes down, must go up. in order to plug into the sewer line the drain lines must be vented - so out comes the hole-saw.


new dogs: 1

The timing was bad, but then again so was our judment to start this project anyway. At least he can't wreck anything more than we have already. Fender is growing up to look alot like Turkish and it's a common reaction from passersby that "oh my gosh they're brothers". With the development of Doggie DNA testing I thought these two might be an interesting candidate for comparison but This seems a more likely outcome.

If this were a movie...

We'd call this the climax. Alli with a pick-axe and a garden spade trying to do the impossible - find a 4" Cast iron waste pipe somewhere under our house. Finding only a 30 pound boulder 4' down from our dining room floor. How did we get here?


In the interest of the movie theme we'll "Tarantino" this story line... I'm going to start at the climax, at the worst, at our lowest moment - at the point where, after 2 days of digging, the shovel rang off of the first significant solid mass. Where in the span of 30 minutes we went from celebration to ritual suicide - when the reality sunk in that it wasn't the drain line it was a hoax - set in motion 106 years ago when an excavator decided to skip the loose fill in favor of landscaping boulders.






Act 1: Across the SEE

The project began with a need to tie our new bathroom waste line into our existing waste line. Because our only bathroom is at the back of our house, and our new bathroom is closer to the front of our house our plumber advised it's "best to avoid running shit backward just make it run forward again". Armed with this logic, we set about locating the existing waste pipes that run under our house and out to the city sewer lines at the street. For this we employed a plumber with a "see snake" which travels the length of your waste line video taping the path of your effluent while also charting a course along the floor of the house. With a modern divining rod, the plumber can find the exact depth and location of the see snake as it slides along.


Not a lovely image to watch but oddly fascinating as we now own a complete VHS recording of the insides of our pipes. Good news, no cave-ins, no roots, no real headaches to speak of. At the end of the day, i had an X mark on my dining room floor that said 4'10 down.


Act 2: Coal Miner's Daughter(s)

Saturday morning we brought in the help.... Neal and Leo, cut a hole in the floor, [again] and we started digging.

and digging


and digging


Act 3: Shawshank Redux


by the end of the day saturday we had a hole, big enough for a dog, but not deep enough to for the pipe. we closed for the night at about 3'6" depth.


Act 4: Easy like Sunday Morning

With the help gone, Alli and I settled in to the task of finishing the work. which now brought us to that sisyphean boulder... ultimately a moment of triumph.

With the boulder freed, we were renewed, and pushed on until,



finally, 2' to the side of where we thought it would be, we found the pipe!


almost like we were never there...

A single 3-way switch to end a marriage

Sure, it looks harmless, even simple in its finished state but this photo represents 2 weekends of futile efforts and petty name-calling. The idea was simple - 3 lights, 2 switches, one 14/3 wire. I now respect the simple act of turning on and off a light from two seperate locations.

Please enjoy....

This series of terribly photographed electrical successes..