So when at the house by myself (and a little bit of the time that Kathryn’s been there), I’ve been taking advantage of the fact that the weather’s been both warm and dry to enjoy the awfulness that is the underside of our house.
I say awfulness, because there are still rat deposits that are fresh, and despite being submerged in nearly 6 inches of water before the sump pump was working, the old rat droppings are also still around. In addition, because of the water issues, the moisture barrier (ha) is covered in a layer of fine powdery silty dust, which kicks up whenever you’re under there.
So I get to wear a mask and come out looking like I’ve been dumpster diving in the desert, which is a delight.
Annnyhow. I’ve been doing plumbing. A lot of plumbing. Some of it’s pretty good, and has worked out the way I intended.
Some of it is truly shit – there are definitely two joints that are highly suspect. If they fail in testing (or at inspection) I may have to replace them with flexible joints. I ended up a few degrees off in my run from the far corner of the house to where the sewer/drain exits the building comes in – and also managed to paint myself into a corner where neither side wanted to move, so ended up with a joint where there’s not the proper overlap of the pipes. And the alignment is a bit crappy.
Still, we’ll see if it tolerates being ‘pressurised’* I’ve got a couple more joints to make in the house on the venting (so currently any sewer gas is venting into the house, which I’m not happy about, but I just couldn’t quite make the last few joints today, but at least now any water that runs into the dwv vents will actually run down into the sewer, and not into a bucket, which is what it has been doing).
I’ve also started to insulate the PEX under the floor because while it was 19°C on Monday, it’s going to be back down to freezing in the next few days, and that up-and-down means I’m wanting to be sure the pipes don’t freeze when we test the plumbing. Thankfully, as it stands while the manifold has some water in, the special run I put in to the garden hose pipe is the only one that actually has any water in. The rest of the runs have not been opened yet.
But what have Kathryn and I been up to?
Well, we’ve continued our quest to remove any remnants of the house we bought.
We’ve pulled out the old french door and framed in one of the two windows. The other of the two windows is currently not framed in (but has the original wall studs there).
We’re getting quicker (and better) at framing, I think.
There’s still some more nails to go into the siding – as it was getting pretty late when we stopped. But… the finish line is inching closer.
* Here they pressure test the waste plumbing by blocking the exits, then filling the system and the vent stack with water.
