avoiding all bad puns related to "plumbing"

Our plumbing fixtures are installed. Of course, I have photos...and since who doesn't love a photo of a toilet, that's what's first:



Originally, a failure of communication made it likely we wouldn't be able to get this toilet and would have to settle for your normal, everyday-looking toilet. Oh no: nothing but the finest for our posteriors...the plumbing crew came through and figured out how to make this one work. We thank them from the bottoms of our hearts.

Next, half of the pair of sinks:



The shower hardware, and the ceiling fan (which informs that "humidistatic" is too a word):



Finally, the bathtub and tub fillers:

What's not here yet is the glass shower enclosure, which will probably be the last thing to be installed of the entire project. We needed to wait for the tiling to be done for them to come out and field-measure the project, and then there's a couple of weeks' lead time until the actual glass is made and can be installed. (At least we hope it's the last item to be installed!)

plumbing in loco

Most of the mechanical rough-ins are nearly finished. Here's a shot, looking straight up from the eventual location of the toilet, showing various vents and stacks as they route their way above the eventual ceiling:



And here's a shot of the "guts" beneath the bathtub:




One minor detail: the old vent stack from the first-floor toilet originally vented out part of the roof which no longer exists. In some earlier photos of this area (I'm too lazy to find them), you might have noticed the decapitated stack. It's now been rerouted to a new vent stack. It would have been more trouble than it's worth to try to cut the old stack down to floor level, so instead it's now boxed in our closet. As it turns out, this will eventually make a pretty functional shoe-putting-on seat!



It's not quite as crazily tangled-looking as I'd hoped - but the plumbers haven't quite finished hooking up the various lines to their sources. This shot of the ceiling of our laundry room doesn't quite convey the chaos... (in the background you can see our new direct-vent water heater: it's the gray box):



Aspects of Rose's bathtub continue to shape up; one we hadn't planned on from the beginning was what to do when the bathroom ceiling fan and light fixture was nixed (due to code). In consultation with the electrician, we settled on a can light fixture above the back of the tub area, so that when Rose is taking a bath and reading (a favorite habit of hers), she'll have adequate light. You can see the box for that light at the top of the next image. The framing you see crossing the image will eventually be a wall, so the windows in the background, above the stairway, will not be visible from this part of the bathroom. However, from nearly any point in the remodeled area, at least one window from another room will be visible. It should be quite light and airy feeling, with a wonderful flow from room to room.



PS: I've been asked why I've never posted a picture of any of the folks doing the work. Well, mostly that's because I never go up there while they're working (I suspect I've been banned - by Rose, probably). However, I did manage to sneak a shot of two of the guys working on our plumbing and HVAC systems.



They were strangely more interested in having me fill out various forms than in doing work, though...

bathing beauty

Some plumbing work done today. They brought up and located Rose's bathtub (I say "Rose's" because she'll be its primary user by a good margin!), and in what will be the shower area some of the control and drain mechanisms are in place:



The beginnings of the reframing of our eyebrow dormer have begun as well:

a door is a jar until it is stuck

A lot of detail work over the past few days involving electrical, HVAC, etc....not all that photographically interesting. But that won't stop me from posting a few!

In the comments on Flickr on a photo of two HVAC ducts in our front hall closet, someone made a reference to Brazil...this shot, of flexible ducts, should reinforce that impression. (Fortunately, the space is not overwhelmed with ducts...nor has Robert DeNiro shown up in an enormously long-billed cap.)



The biggest excitement was a bit of a headache over the placement of the doorframe to our bedroom. As it happens, between the ceiling height, roof slope, and placement of the central chase to accommodate HVAC, there's only exactly enough room for a door of the legally required height and width. As this photo demonstrates, it just barely fits. Some of the trim will need to be cut off (a fairly common thing; in fact, most of the doors on the first floor of our house exhibit this trait), but so long as the outer layer of trim is replaced along the edge of the doorframe (including along any angled cut), it'll look fine.



Initially, the duct in this photo curved the other way, stealing space from our hallway and forcing the doorway toward the sloping roof...it wouldn't have worked like that.



Now, we've got it going the opposite way, so it steals space where we don't care about it: the closet (which feels large enough to park my Mini Cooper in, should we need an extra parking space, should we build a ramp to allow access. But that would mean more floor reinforcements! Damn...). In addition to her cleverness in figuring out how to locate the door exactly in about the only place it could be located (while preserving the overall spatial flow of the area), Rose was exceedingly clever here: originally, the air return was going to be in front of the door in the photo above, to the right. But that (again) would have pushed the doorframe a few inches toward the roof - nope, can't do it. What to do? Why, run the return duct between the floorboards and have it come up on the opposite wall, of course. (The duct guys haven't been back yet, I don't think...Erik, our contractor, thinks there'll be no problem with this idea.)

The other main work of the past few days is electrical. All the funky little boxes that contain the various wiring are in place (although we found out that code prohibited our bathroom ceiling fan: not enough room to keep it far enough away from the bathtub...), and much of the wiring is in place. Plumbing work, too: here you can get a good idea of where our two sinks, nearby electrical outlets, vanity lights, and two mirrors (between each set of lights) will go:



The framing for the bathroom pocket door is in place, also:



The roofing is nearly complete, with an entirely new layer of shingles and new venting...but I haven't been able to get a good photo. It would help if I were thirty feet tall.

plans and floors and roofs and things

Rather a whirlwind of activity over the past few days. By Wednesday, the eventual profile of the roof of our dormers was becoming clear:



Yesterday we had two teams of workers, our usual carpenters inside and roofers outside, the latter tearing up the accumulated three layers of shingles and making quite the impressive racket and equally impressive mess all over the ground. Or rather, all over a large tarp they'd spread on the ground. And then, about half an hour before they were probably due to finish for the day, a sudden downpour forced them to scramble to make sure everything was watertight. They decided to put in some extra work today (a Saturday), and they finished about a third of the roof with new shingles (and cleaned up that mess as well).

Inside, we had the plumber running the drainage system for the bath and shower and two bathroom sinks (and if someone can tell me why Blogger insists on rotating that second photo, I'd like to know: it's correctly oriented in every other display of it I can come up with) -




- while the next day, the carpenters built the frame support for the tub surround and put in the subflooring in the bathroom:



Meanwhile, they also installed the frame for the double pocket doors for our closet -



- and the rough framework for an alcove space, which was originally going to be a gas fireplace (until budgetary reality hit home: we're still running up a gas line behind this space, so that if we decide to put in the fireplace in the future, it'll be easy to do so):



Meanwhile, we were busy too: we finally decided on the plumbing fixtures, and purchased bathroom accessories (towel bars and the like) and all the lighting fixtures for all four spaces (bedroom, hall, bathroom, and closet).

Our contractor (and friend) Erik also kept himself busy: now he's a farmer...and a budding video star... (This is a video put up by Outpost Coop, our community coop store, at their YouTube site.)