Slow Going

Well, there has been some progress—good progress, really—just not fast progress.  Trenching in concrete is not something that flies.  But this is where I am:

That stud compartment in the back (the black segment, without the yellow insulation, is where the drain pipe for the washing machine will go.  The 2" ABS drain pipe will go down through the bottom of the wall and run along the trench, and then empty into the vertical pipe (in the middle of the trench, where it makes the turn).  Unfortunately, that vertical drain pipe is located in the foundation wall, meaning it's encased in concrete half-way to China (or at least as far down as I need to go).  It has to be cut off maybe 18" below the floor level in order to make the necessary connections.  Slow going.

Partway down that far trench, I have to put in a floor drain that will empty into the washing machine drain; the floor drain is for the condensate from the high-efficiency water heater (the one I haven't bought yet).  At the near end of the trench (not quite finished), there will be another floor drain; this one for the air-handler condensate drain, as well as the water softener back-flush drain.  All of this will be clearer as we proceed (in a month or six).

Much of the slowness has been due to the fact that the back (long) part of the trench had to be blasted out of what had once been the garage floor.  The garage floor was, of course, a concrete slab, maybe 4" thick.  When a prior owner decided to convert the back half of the garage into a bedroom, they had to raise the floor level another 4" or so to match the floor level in the rest of the house.  Meaning—they poured another concrete slab on top of the garage slab.  So I had to trench down through two slabs, one on top of the other.  As I said, slow going.

Unpleasant work, but I've been approaching it as if it was a hobby, a few hours a day.  Cut the boundaries with the diamond bladed circular saw—huge amounts of cement dust.  Blast away at the concrete with my beloved (but heavy) electric demolition hammer—also lots of dust.  Then down on my knees in the room full of dust to dig out the debris and haul it outside by the bucketful.  Knee pads, ear plugs, gloves, full-face respirator, and a hood.

The full-face respirator is incredible!  Highly recommended.  Keeps all the bad stuff out of eyes and lungs, and the faceplate doesn't fog up, even when the sweat is pouring down my face (yes, breaking concrete is good cardio).

Can't keep that up all day—my knees won't take the bending, so I've filled in my breaks with other new hobbies, to wit, designing and building violins.  Well, yes, odd, since I don't play the violin.  In fact, I've never even seen one in person, but I like to learn completely new things.  Interesting community, violin builders are (ain't the internet wonderful!).  The remodeling continues to take up too much space to build violins yet (what with the gutted rooms piled with junk—er, valued possessions—waiting to find their places in the finished house), so I've just been designing.

Perhaps violins are not so strange, because I did actually build high-end electric guitars for some years (and I never played those either).

No room to build a violin (yet), but I did just finish building a violin bow yesterday.  That was, how shall we say, a learning experience.  Not sure what I'm going to do with it just yet.

That nice black thing in the bottom photo (called a "frog," with the abalone dot with the circle around it), was store-bought—that I didn't make.  The "stick"—the long part that looks like a stick, is made from cocobolo.  Every other violin bow in the world (pretty much) is a plain straight stick all the way to the back end.  My bow has a "pinky perch" at the back end, over the frog.  Self-respecting violinists, who have been practicing for hours a day for years, have developed pinkies with the strength, dexterity, and coordination to stay on a plain stick without assistance.  When I tried it, no such luck (and I've read that other newbies have the same problem, so the pinky perch is my contribution to violin bow ergonomics).  I expect it will remain a one-of-a kind.  Hmm.

Okay, in the evening I always try to spend some time working on Daughtry's World, my current novel-in-progress and the fourth in the Samsara science-fiction series.  I pretty much have the complete chronological narrative figured out, and the character arcs as well.  I have started putting together the scene outline—in other words, the structure of the novel from beginning to end.  Since this is a murder mystery, the book will most certainly not start at the chronological beginning of the events that led to the three linked murders.  The first scene is to be the assassination of the third victim, during which two of the three assassins end up dead (the victim definitely fought back!)

In the next scene, Kevin Daughtry (the investigator, and past Samsara character), is pulled from his regular posting to investigate the murders.  He doesn't know why they picked him, and his contact (another past Samsara character) won't tell him much.  And it goes from there, with flashbacks filling in the story as Daughtry solves the riddles of the mystery, with a little help from his friends.  It's been slow going for me, but the process should now go faster.

The story will have its own arc, but it will also fill in further pieces of the greater arc of the whole Samsara series (and that world).  My intent is to ensure that Daughtry's World can be read by itself, but obviously people who have read the first three novels in the series will get more out of it.  I try to put a lot of depth in my stories (I want every word to have significance); if a reader skims, he or she will miss much of the experience.  Many may find that a second reading is even more gratifying than the first, especially after taking in one or more of the other novels in the series.

Next time, the laundry room drain pipes go in.

New Laundry/Mechanicals Room - Part 4

I had my second cataract surgery a week ago, so another week before I'm cleared to start doing heavy demolition (i.e. trenching through concrete).  I'm in no hurry.  I did manage to get some of that work done before the latest surgery, to wit, running a new drain line from the future location of the guest bathroom vanity sink, to an  existing vertical drain pipe (that had been used for the old master bathroom vanity).  Confused?

Before I did that, in an effort to contain the thick clouds of concrete dust produced by the diamond bladed circular saw slicing through concrete, I built the wall that closes off the opening between the home theater and the new laundry room.  Photos taken 1) from the home theater, and 2) from inside the laundry room.

Then I put plastic sheet over this new stud wall and started cutting through the concrete.  The slab was only about 3" thick where the new drain pipe needed to go, but it quickly got thicker, more than a foot thick, as I worked my way toward the foundation wall of the house proper.  I discovered that beyond that (what was originally the garage), there was no foundation wall under that slab edge, and the slab was only about 4" thick.  Good news for when I get around to trenching for the new washing machine drain line.

Once that new trench was filled with concrete, I could build the part of the laundry room wall that separates it from the new guest bathroom.  The new wall is flush with the back wall of the laundry room, and provides more area for the guest bathroom, needed for a new vanity (and some storage).  That new wall segment will also house a new electrical subpanel, replacing the old, physically smaller subpanel box that was in the old, smaller laundry room (it's about five feet to the left of where the new panel is).  You can see the new panel in this photo, just sitting in place for the photo.  The old smaller panel, besides being cramped, is located behind where the washer and dryer will be going, which is a no-no.  The area in front of electrical panels has to be open.

You might also notice that the door leading to my only current bathroom is now behind a stud wall.  That door, and the whole wall it is in, will be removed (soon), and a new pocket door will be installed between that bathroom and the home theater (which will also serve as the guest bedroom).  Until that happens, access to the bathroom will entail sidling between the studs.  Good thing I'm thin!

My New Oven is Operational!

After more than a year without a real oven, my wait is over.  After making the electrical connections, I put my new oven to the test.  No more store-bought bread, no more frozen pizza!

I'm now recovering from cataract surgery on my right eye, and expect to have the same procedure done on my left eye within a few weeks (all that time out on the water in the bright sun).  No heavy lifting allowed, so breaking through concrete to run new drain pipes will have to wait a little while longer.

The New Kitchen - Part Three

My brother just came for his short visit today; I had three lifting tasks ready for him: 1) getting a new heavy jointer (big power tool) out of the back of my car, 2) lifting the new large and heavy living room window into the opening I had prepared just for this occasion, and 3) helping to lift my oven into the new kitchen cabinets I just built.  The making of the kitchen cabinets had moved to the top of the priority list after I learned he was coming (three weeks notice).

I had been doing conceptual design work for quite some time, but I still needed to decide on some specific dimensions and put them to paper.  I prefer to build cabinet bases separately, make them all nice and level, so that after that it is just a matter of plopping the cabinet cases on top of the base.  I am making the bases out of 2 x 8s, which makes the bases nominally 7.5" tall, but during leveling on the un-level concrete floor, I removed up to a half-inch of that height.

Stock bases are typically recessed 3" from the cabinet faces, and so are mine.  While my bases are about 7" high, stock kitchen cabinets generally have a much lower toe-kick (about 3"), but I've found that my toes tend to kick the bottom edge of stock cabinets, so I wanted more height for my big feet.  Stock cabinet bases are also made from 3/4" stock, but I wanted mine to be sturdier.  The base was secured to the studs in the wall, and also screwed down to the concrete floor.  Overkill?  Maybe, but we have earthquakes out here.

I was making two cabinets — one for the wall oven and the other adjacent one would house the microwave.  Also lots of drawers beneath the ovens, and above the ovens, slide-out shelves (like sideways drawers).  These are big cabinets, 28" deep, and tall.  I put the car out of the garage to make space for cutting out the pieces and assembly.  The cases are made from 3/4" cabinet-grade plywood, with 1/2" plywood backs.  All the pieces are glued together with tongue and groove joints, biscuits, and plywood lugs supporting structural shelves.

White plastic laminate was put on the side that will show; the plastic laminate also went on the microwave oven shelf.  When the cases were finished, I placed them on the base and lined everything up, then screwed them together, to the base, and to the studs in the wall and to the overhead soffit.  Not going anywhere.

With the cases securely in place, I applied 3/4" solid maple facing to the plywood edges, and applied three coats of satin polyurethane to the maple.  I finished connecting the electrical receptacle in the microwave cubby, and drilled a hole for the cable from the oven to the compartment above, where the junction box will go (connects to the cable from the breaker box — 30 amp, 240 volt circuit).

I still have to build all the drawers for the two cabinets (and lots more cabinets for the rest of the kitchen), but once I make the electrical connections, I will finally be able to bake again!

New Laundry/Mechanicals Room - Part 3

At the end of Part 2 of the laundry room saga, we were left with an unwanted wall full of electrical cables, gas lines, drain pipes, water supply lines, and old studs.

Bit by bit, I began removing these things.  The gas pipe was relatively easy (not my first time, which helped).  Turn off the main gas (outside at the meter), bleed the pressure off at the gas dryer valve, saw off the branch pipe near where it goes into the main line, then use a pipe wrench to unscrew it from the coupler, then install a plug.  The water heater pilot light then needed relighting.

The big challenge was removing the washing machine drain pipe, which ran down into the concrete.  It turns out the people who built the house poured the footings, foundation wall, and slab all at once (called a monolithic pour or slab).  Doing it that way saves a lot of labor costs (associated with building and removing forms, and pouring concrete in three stages), but it uses a lot more concrete.  Most of this extra concrete ends up around the periphery of the slab (the foundation walls are a lot thicker than they need to be in order to be as wide as the footings are required to be, and because there are no forms on the inside of the foundation walls—just dirt, and the dirt tends to slump and need digging out, and the resulting bigger hole filled with yet more concrete).

So when I starting hammering down through the concrete, I was dismayed not to find the 4" slab thickness I encountered in the bathroom (away from the outside of the slab).

After digging down a foot through solid concrete (and still not finding dirt), I gave up, cut off the drain pipe below the surface, and covered the hole with a piece of plywood and a scrap of carpet.  With the drain/vent pipe gone, I could wheel the washing machine out (built a new dolly for that), and relocate my temporary sink to the new kitchen.  Of course they would be useless without a water supply, so I ran some new temporary pex water lines.

I had capped and removed the old 3/4" copper pipes running to that part of the house, so I removed those SharkBite caps, and using push-on SharkBite reducing couplers, hooked up the 1/2" pex to the 3/4" copper.  No soldering required.

Here is the temporary sink in its new location, with color-coded pex hot and cold water lines running down from the attic.  The sink drains to the new drain pipe I had already run for the permanent kitchen sink.  That drain pipe uses an air-admittance valve (the white thing at the top of the vertical black ABS drain) in place of a vent pipe running up through the roof.  Not much water running through the sink drain.  (At the other end of the drain line, there is a vent pipe that runs through the roof; it's just not real close to the sink.  The air-admittance valve supplements that other vent stack.)

With the sink and washing machine out of the new laundry room, I had more room to work on getting rid of the rest of the stuff in the wall:

Most of the copper supply lines could simply be cut off and capped in the attic, but there was one cold water line that ran through this mess and fed the toilet in the adjacent bathroom, and also an outside faucet.  There was an unused 1/2" copper cold water line in the attic; I connected a temporary 1/2" pex line to that (using a SharkBite coupler) which I ran down to the copper stub from the toilet and outside faucet.  I made the connection with a plastic elbow (using Uponor ProPex expander system) and another SharkBite coupling.  No soldering, very fast.

This morning I installed a reinforcing beam in the attic and removed the rest of the wall.  So now I can continue unfettered hammering through the concrete slab.  New drains for the guest bathroom sink, the washing machine, and two floor drains for the water softener backflush, and condensate from the future high-efficiency water heater and heat pump air handler.

Only that's not what I'm going to do next.  My brother is visiting from the east coast in a couple of weeks.  I'm going to prep for the new living room window, too big for me to lift by myself.  I'm also going to try to build the floor-to-ceiling kitchen cabinets for the wall oven and adjacent microwave.  The wall oven is too heavy/bulky for me to install by myself, so hopefully those cabinets will be finished by the time my brother arrives.  The side benefit for doing that is that I will be able to start baking again (bread and pizza from scratch!).

Will it happen?  Stay tuned.

Master Bathroom - Part Two

Work around here always seems to get shifted from one project to another on a somewhat arbitrary basis, but there is some logic to the progression (if not always apparent).

After removing the pocket door from the old laundry room, I installed it between the new master bedroom and master bathroom to get it out of the way (still needs some blocking on top—everything in its time):

With our unusually hot weather, work in the attic (preliminary to removing the unwanted wall in the middle of the new laundry/mechanicals room) has only been possible for a short time in the morning before the intense sun turned the attic into an oven.  So I started framing the shower in the new master bathroom during the rest of the day.

You may notice there is a washing machine sitting in the middle of the shower, and temporary pex hot and cold water supply lines dangling down from the ceiling.  Hmmm.  What you can't see is that the washer is sitting on a dolly, used to wheel the machine from the old laundry room to this new temporary location (where it is making good use of the newly installed shower drain pipe).

I've also been doing detailed design work on the bathroom, which takes time, and more time.  You'll see the results in a future post.  For now, work is being shifted to other projects ;-)

New Laundry/Mechanicals Room - Part 2

My foster dog Jenny had thirteen pups, starting at around 7 p.m., with the last little one coming out at 2:05 a.m.  Interesting experience, delivering babies; mom had the hardest time of it, to be sure, but she did not do all the work.  Two of the pups were stillborn, which left eleven for the new mom to nurse.  Too many, as it turned out.

Jenny became more secure in my house (less scared), and after a few days started acting more like a normal dog when she was out in back on her breaks (away from the voracious pups).  She was skin and bones when she came from the shelter, and despite eating four times a day, still seemed to be losing weight.  I separated out the four largest pups for bottle feeding, which they never really embraced, and tried getting them all to take the bottle, but it was not enough.  After about five days of nursing, Jenny's appetite dropped off, and later she stopped producing milk.

I urged my rescue contact to find someone to take some of the pups for hand-raising, but nothing came of that.  She was focused on the pups, and not on the mom; I was the reverse.  Finally the rescue told me to take mom and pups to the vet to get checked out.  Jenny was really stressed by that—shaking scared.  I was also informed that someone from another rescue with more "experience" raising pups would take over their care.

After that, it took three days to get any information from my rescue contact about Jenny's fate, and was simply told she was doing well.  Not sure there wasn't more I was not hearing, but in any case, I have been motivated to put my thoughts toward the remodel.  I told the rescue I would like to adopt Jenny; we'll see what happens.

Back to the laundry/mechanicals room.  The new entrance would be a four foot wide opening to the hall—no door.  As I explained in the last post, the wall in the middle of the new room was load bearing, and needed some extra support above the ceiling before the wall could be removed.  The first step was to remove the old pocket door and wall that separated the laundry from the hallway (not load bearing).  Thus:

Framing the new wall was relatively straightforward, although the recycled header/beam I was using over the opening was twisted and needed a few passes through a thickness planer to make it work.  The photos were taken from the hall and from inside the old cramped laundry room.

The next step was to put in the supporting beams in the attic before removing the load-bearing wall, but 1) the attic was too hot for that right now, and 2) I discovered the two black ABS vent pipes in the wall run up right where the new beams will go, so I needed to either move or remove those vent pipes (which service the washing machine and sink drains).  In the meantime I began removing more drywall.  Which brings us to this:

Everything inside that stud wall has to go: ABS drain and vent pipes, copper hot and cold water supply lines, electrical wiring, and a steel natural gas pipe (which was there to feed a gas clothes dryer—mine is electric).

That sink (covered with black plastic sheet) is the only one in the house now; I need that every day.  The washing machine also needs to remain operational.  I first considered moving them around in the room, but new drain pipes mean tearing up concrete (Oh, no!  Not that again!); I need open space!

So now the plan is to relocate the sink to the new kitchen, to make use of the newly installed kitchen sink drain pipe (as a temporary measure), and to relocate the washing machine to the new master bathroom, using the newly installed shower drain pipe.  Today I ordered a bunch of pex (cross-linked polyethylene) water supply line plumbing stuff, so I can rig up some temporary hot and cold water lines, which actually should be fairly simple.  Once I man-handle the sink cabinet and washing machine to their new locations, I can proceed with disappearing that unwanted wall.

Until next time . . .