Pipes and Framing

This should have been last Friday's post. I'm running a bit behind on my posting, but here it is at last.
The major work of the past couple of weeks has been water lines and framing.
Three weekends ago our neighbors the Brewer's helped us on Saturday morning. Valerie watched Evan and Bianca at their place while Derek came over and helped Shawn with framing a bulkhead around the plumbing along the family room as you can see in this first picture.

While Derek worked on the framing, Shawn and I began pulling the hot and cold water lines for the entire house. Even the lines for the upstairs bathrooms and kitchen, though those pipes will not get hooked on. As you can see in this picture, we ran enough pipe to reach the fixtures above. But what we'll do is we'll coil the pipes you see hanging down inside the joist bays. In a few years when we're ready to move on to the upstairs, will stub them out where they need to go.

During labor day weekend, my in-laws came down again to help us out. The guys spent all day Saturday and Sunday framing the bulkheads around the duct work in what we call Evan's Room and the Back Bedroom. We need all of the framing to be done so that the drywaller can come around and frame the walls. Pam helped me clean and catch up on laundry. She also gave the broom a good workout in the new house and cleaned up the mess from the electrician and Shawn drilling holes everywhere, and from when we ran the chases in the foam for electrical. There was quite a mess down there, but she did a great job of straightening it all out.

On Labor Day, Shawn's dad helped us to finish pulling all of the water lines for the house while grandma watched the tykes. With the three of us our work went fast. The next few pictures show a couple of examples of the pipes as they weave their way back to the mechanical room.

This one here is running along the bulkhead in the family room and it has all of the pipes for the kitchen and laundry room upstairs.






This one shows all of the pipes from the east side of the house as they enter the mechanical room.








This one has all of the pipes for the whole house in the mechanical room.













And here is where they all culminate where eventually there will be a manifold handling all of those pipes.

You can see the bottom part of the wall has a sheet of tile backer board. Shawn can't cover the top half yet because there is some electrical wire that we can't cover until the electrical inspection has been done. The electrician got done today, so hopefully they pulled the inspection permit today and we can expect the inspector to come out within 48 hrs. It will be nice if Shawn can get going on the water manifold.

So last weekend Shawn worked on getting the bath, kitchen and laundry all stubbed out and ready for drywall. So here you can see the bathroom sinks stubbed out. We still need to strap the pipes to the wall, but that should not take too long.

The next pictures show our shower/tub controls and nipple for shower head all done! Yes, as soon as we have water flowing we can take showers if we wanted.























This picture here shows our laundry room connections ready to go:















Here is the kitchennette stubbed out. That wall got quite a butchering will all of the water lines, electric lines and drain pipes that needed to go there. But after it gets covered with drywall, no one will notice.


The other interesting thing that happened lately is that our well pump quit on us. Being submerged in that last flood wasn't good for it, and even after spending all day taking it apart to fix it, we couldn't get it to work. Bathing out of buckets and living like pioneers got old after three days. So Shawn hooked up a pipe to the rural water supply in the new house and ran it to the outside water hydrant. We're pumping water backwards into it to get to the old house. So far that seems to be working out all right. But this is yet another reason why we need to be out of the old house before that pipe freezes when it starts getting too cold!

We had a meeting Sunday with a guy to come and spray foam the rim joist and the windows in the basement, and we're meeting a second contractor on Thursday for a second quote. We expect that probably next week we'll award the contract to one of them and they can get going. As soon as the electrical inspection is done, and that rim joist is foamed, our drywaller, Jose, can get started. Can't wait!

Until next time.