Plumbing and uniform ceiling heights...

Plumbing and uniform ceiling heights...

October 9th -- Ha!  There is nothing that is uniform in a house that is 110-years old....but one can dream, right?  More about this later, but for now the good news is that with so much of the mechanical systems being replaced there will be state of the art heating (even though the heating duct work was challenging because of constraints from the age of the house and having to retrofit the duct work through the attic to the upper level rooms).  Will there be similar challenges with the other mechanical systems?

To attempt an answer, today's focus -- the first of many -- will be on plumbing.  The plumbers have been working to begin the process of laying in pipe.  Below are a few photos from the new master bathroom.

Here you can see the plumbing for the sink drains for the double vanity.

Here is the view from outside the bathroom, which also shows the pipe venting to the roof.

Back inside the master bathroom, here is where the very cool Toto toilet will be installed. 

The photo above and this next one, show that the original flooring, which was the old master bedroom, is in pretty rough shape.  A new overlay will need to be installed to strengthen the floor, or as my contractor has told me, it is a good thing that I don't weigh more than I do because I could have easily found myself falling to the floor below!

This next photo below shows a new overlay on the floor of what will be the main-level guest bathroom, and a similar overlay will be installed in the master bathroom floor (above).

When completed, the house will go from having two full baths to a total of four bathrooms (two full on the upper level and two on the main level (a full guest bathroom and a 3/4 bathroom in the gathering room addition).  Since all of these bathrooms have to connect to the main sewer line, there is a growing maze of plumbing, as shown in the photos below. 

OK, this post started out with a tease about uniform ceiling heights.  It turns out that an interesting challenge has presented itself.  Because of specifications made by the structural engineers, the ceiling height of the addition is a bit over an inch lower than the ceiling of the original house.  The architect anticipated this, and because the new galley kitchen will span the old kitchen and the new addition, the solution is to re-frame the ceiling in the old kitchen to align with the ceiling height in the addition.

These next few photos show the work of the framers that will result in lowering the existing kitchen ceiling.

I can hear you saying, so what's the challenge in that?  Well, while the kitchen ceiling will be lowered, the floor height is also off, but only by about 3/4 of an inch.  We can't really raise or lower the floors, so the new kitchen wood floor will match the floor in the addition, but to make the transition from the dining room to the kitchen floor, a threshold will mask the slight difference in the floor height.  Yeah, I still hear you saying, so what's the challenge?  Well, it turns out that the southwest corner of the house has settled over time such that the south side of the kitchen floor has also settled to be about an inch lower than the north side of the kitchen floor.  There is no real good fix for that because the floor joists go into the brick foundation and to jack up the floor height, we'd have to go into the foundation, and .... well, you already know from earlier posts how scary that brick foundation is.  

So, when you come to visit and you are standing in the kitchen and you think that you've had too much wine because you feel like you are listing to one side, you can actually have some more wine, because it is not you that is listing!   So much for uniform anything in my old-new house....

Below you can see the original hutch that was built into the kitchen 110 years ago that will remain, but will be located just outside the new pantry and across from the new laundry room.

And, the plumbers have already roughed in the hot and cold water connections and drain for the washer, as shown below.

The framers have maybe 1-2 more days of work and they will be done for now.  After the plumbers get more of their work done, the framers will be back to frame the "boxes" that will hide the plumbing and heating duct work that don't nicely fit into the existing joists and studs.

Besides the plumbers, the electricians will come to make a major assault on rewiring and putting in new wiring.  This means that I will soon have some meetings about outlet placement throughout the house, and I'll need to make some choices about light fixtures.  After the wiring and outlets are settled, and the final framing is done, the dry-wall crew will appear, along with the much anticipated new walls.