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.