I’ve finally forced myself to work on my apartment! I have a new bathroom and (almost) kitchen. This is very exciting since I did the original planning for the kitchen back in March 2007.
Kitchen:
I still have electrical to do… The entire apartment still needs to be rewired. Then I’ll refinish the floors. If I have time before I leave to work for a small fruit company in Cupertino.
I’ve been pounding away at apartment 3. I have had very little time to post, or do much else, but I did snap a few pictures along the way.
I’ll get some comments and a real post going soon. For now, I have a lot of clean up to get done.
When you rent out your house, minor maintenance issues normally go unnoticed until they are huge problems. Apparently, in My Other Houseâ„¢ there was a small leak from the tub spigot that was allowing a small amount of water to go through the wetboard down to the first floor bathroom ceiling. Again, a minor issue really only requiring a little tightening of the spigot and some caulk. However, when ignored for long periods, this problem explodes into something much, much bigger. In this, it didn’t explode, but it certainly fell on my head:
Why are all the shower faucets available at Lowes and Homie Depot of the type that don’t let you control the water temperature and pressure?!?
Even though it’s been unusually warm around here, I made the decision to replace the furnace. The old beast was working, but with gas prices so high its ~50% efficiency left a huge hurt in the gas bill.
There were some minor issues, but all in all things went very smoothly. It took the afternoon to remove the old furnace and leave a big empty spot in center of the house.
Then, on New Year’s Eve, I was able wrestle the new furnace in place. I used some concrete backer-board to raise the furnace off the ground and line its height up to the AC coils. The concrete backer-board also allowed me to level out the floor slightly. (Actually, I made it slightly unlevel to keep the water from the coils flowing down to the drain hose.) 
Then I built the return plenum and repaired some of the poorly done vent ducts. To connect the gas, I cheated… I used a flexible gas pipe to get from the valve to the furnace. Easy, cheap… no leaks. Lastly, I connected the new super-fancy computerized thermostat. This alone should cut my heating/cooling cost significantly.
So… installing a furnace is something you can do yourself! Of course, warm winter weather is always good to give you time to do it.
PS. Happy New Year!
Thanksgiving… a time for saying “Thank goodness we’re done!”
The weekend before Thanksgiving, I went nuts on the upstairs (henceforth labeled Apt #2). The aforementioned “half wall” was torn out completely and the preparations for a banister were made. I made all the connections for the washer and dryer and finalized much of the wiring. I also hung the cabinets in the kitchen, basically completely that room. But I was just getting started!
Thanksgiving week/weekend has been the long haul to the end. With Liz’s help, we plowed through a few late nights and finished it all! The banister is up and looking very nice! I completed the closet where the washer and dryer could be, though I’m not going to put one in yet. Liz completed lots of painting. I put up new light fixtures, including a new vent in one of the bathrooms. Then it was on to all the small things… the endless small things that finish a large project like this: outlet covers, cleaning, goo-gone on sticky-post-tile-flooring, cleaning, touch-up painting, cleaning, wiring the CAT-5e, cleaning, weather-sealing, cleaning, caulking… did I mention cleaning? Cleaning and picking up all the tools/extra construction supplies took the better part of a day!
Along the way I learned a lot… like never put a toilet in and walk way! Even it doesn’t look like it is leaking right away, give it 5 mins. After putting one in, I came back after a few hours to find a veritable lake in the bathroom. The tank had a small crack in it… so to the trash heap it went. I also learned how to texture joint compound to somewhat closely match the surrounding wall texture. By using a roller with a high nap, vary the amount of water in the roller to change how much it “grabs” the joint compound. I also learned how all this work will have a limited impact except in my own mind. The new electrical was the main goal of the project, yet no one will ever notice or care that it was done. I still think it was more than needed, but I’m not sure it will even raise the resale value in the end. This realization is more than slightly disappointing… but I still feel good having done it.
Enough, check out the pics (click on ’em for the big picture)!
For the past several weeks I’ve been too busy with work-work to actually do any home-work. However, this weekend changed that! I knocked out a huge section of the wiring on Thursday and Friday. Then, with Liz’s help, we leapt forward in progress this weekend. I completely finished the wiring, Liz chiseled off the stick’em vinyl tiles in the 2nd bedroom, and I sawed down the wall on the staircase to make the landing area.
We are both extremely excited about how the upstairs is looking. It is much more welcoming with the new lighting, and roomier with the wall half gone. This week, every free minute will be use to start cleaning up so we can start the finishing work. There is one large area that needs drywall, but there are also several smaller holes and places that need patching. Then paint, clean and RENT!
So this past weekend, I made an emergency trip to DC to become a professional-hobby plumber. Apparently in the time my house had spent empty made the tree roots in the main sewer line grow huge and clog the line in their endless search for water. After some fighting with “pro” plumbers about snaking the drain and their efforts failing, I bought a plane ticket out there. It was cheaper the fly out myself and do the work than to hire another “pro”.
So, Jay and I first tried to snake the drain. We successfully put the entire snake down there… then, when pulling it back out, it became stuck! I pulled and pushed… but it wouldn’t budge. Jay and I took turns listening around the house to determine where it was stuck. Jay placed a brick where we thought it was just as I was giving the snake one last final tug. The snake snapped… and slowly came out minus the cutting end! I’ll leave out the colorful language, but trust me, I wasn’t happy. We returned that snake, and after demonstrating my great debating skills to the store manager, he canceled the rental contract and sent us on our way with his condolences.
We had a lot of work in front of us… so we bought a shovel and borrowed a small pick axe. We dug huge hole through hard clay: 3ft wide by 4ft long by 3.5ft deep! We found the place where a previous owner had connect a new main-sewer line to the old clay pipe. Right next to that was a junction point in the old clay pipe. It was there, in the junction, that roots galore flowed into the pipe. We had found the problem! And only after one day of back-breaking digging!
So the next day, we bought a Saws-All and nice set of metal blades. Jay started cutting… and cutting… and then I cut… and cut… and nothing! We hardly scratch the pipe! Apparently what we thought to be cast iron was actually hardened steel! Back to Home Depot to buy a better blade: a “grit cutter” blade. This thing was incredible. It still took ~2 hours to cut the pipe out, but we got it out.
We were hoping to be able to pull out some of the tree roots from the hole, but we couldn’t really get to any of them. So… we rented another snake. We successfully pulled out ~5lbs of tree roots! To test the drain, I put in a rubber “y” while Jay returned the snake. Sure enough… you guessed it… it STILL DIDN’T DRAIN!!! It was late, so we called it a day and went to sulk in our beer.
Day 3… Jay had hurt himself, so I was working by myself. I rented another snake and start pushing it in and out. I should certainly mention the working conditions here. Once we cut the pipe, raw sewage came flooding out into our pristine hole. The hard clay absorbed the black nastiness and smell never really went away. So… back to the snaking. Every time I pulled the snake out, a small gush of sweet smelling black tree roots accompanied it. This was obviously the problem. I very slowly started pushing the snake back in for one final cut. I waited every 2-3in until there was no “cutting” action felt with each turn of the snake before pushing it in further. Then, the snake became stuck! It wouldn’t go forward, nor backward; in fact, it wouldn’t even turn. It was completely bound up! Again… colorful language spewed from my mouth like sewage from a cut sewer pipe. I tried to put a little more tension on the snake to pull it out. Then… SNAP. The outside “sping” section of the snake had broke, leaving only the safety steel inner cable. 
I stopped using the spinning function of the snake and just started tugging on the snake to get it out. While doing this, the entire clay-junction was moving all around. I deduced there was a huge chunk-o-tree-root pulling at the junction. The junction had to come out.
This is what came out of the drain with the broken snake! Another +10lbs of tree roots! Now… on to patching the junction in the clay pipe. Luckily, on one of my many trips to Home Depot, I found this amazing epoxy putty. This stuff hardens to rock in only 3-4 minutes, even under water. I bought all they had and started filling in the huge gap in the junction and large holes left by the now missing tree roots. I put our “y” back in and installed our clean out, then tested away. And the water flowed!!! THESE PIPES ARE CLEAN! I dumped a bunch of copper sulfate around our work to prevent further root infestation, and called it a day. I left the hole there for Jay to fill later incase another problem came up.
I then went to meet up with my DC friends. I had only ~12hrs left in DC. So what did I do with my friends? I painted their apartment! I can’t get away from this home improvement thing! This is Sara, Meg, and John painting Sara’s apartment. Thanks everyone for showing me a great time.
We made progress in wiring the upstairs. Now we just have one bathroom and one bedroom to wire. I also put in some low-voltage backboxes so I can can put in CAT5 (for ethernet or phone) and maybe coax at a later date. Liz also patched all the extra large holes I made…
In the process of finding a good path to pull new wiring from the basement, we decided that our numerous sorta-unwanted housemates had to die! That’s right… spiders. I know spiders provide a good service in reducing bugs and all… but I think we had just a few too many. As I was putting the glow-in-the-dark wire-puller up the wall, several of our smaller housemates dropped down on me to say “hi”. I don’t like spiders, but I leave them alone if the leave me alone. If they are in my space, I move them. However, if they touch me… Game over! Meet Mr. Fumigator!
In our most recent trip to Lowes (which has become a daily – sometimes twice-daily – occurrence) we were on the search for backboxes. You know those cute little blue boxes that you put in the wall to support the outlet. We were looking for the “old construction” boxes with the little tabs to keep the boxes in the wall. Lowes had 1. And it was broken. Of course. So we drove an hour to the Bedford Lowes and wiped them out of all 6 of their old construction backboxes. So… All your backboxes are belong to us!
A minor victory has been won against the sink in former Apt 4. See… I decided to replace the faucet with a nicer one since the old hardly work and was pretty nasty. With the new came a new drain stopper and assembly. I thought, “Heck, I’ll just replace the entire p-trap.” In the process of removing the old formerly-chrome-now-rust p-trap, a small section of the cast iron drain pipe in the wall came out with it. This certainly made an easy job very difficult.
Well… I finally found the right rubber seal/adaptor to allow me to connect the new p-trap to the partially broken cast iron drain pipe in the wall.
Note the new faucet… it matches the one we put in the kitchen. Also note, the linoleum and quarter-round will be replaced soon.
