Hurray for Me!

Is it OK if I brag a little about my latest project? :) As you have seen before Travis got our water hooked up last week (hurray!), but the faucet in our upstairs bathroom had a steady leak because the faucet was damage. Thus, we ordered a new faucet, one that we like for when we fix up the bathroom down the road.Travis had wanted to get it replaced before he went out of town for the weekend, but he ran out of time. So, I decided to take the project on myself and much to my delight IT WORKED!!! I removed the old faucet and drain and installed the new ones and when I put it all back together there were no geysers going off! When I took of the pea trap it was naturally filled with water and I almost dumped it down the sink...yeah, not a good plan I decided. Otherwise it went smoothly and I'm pretty excited to show off my handwork to Travis when he gets back tomorrow!

Old, ugly leaky faucet

New, pretty, NON-leaky faucet

Sarah

Finally, we have some pictures of our new dog, Sarah! They're not the greatest pictures, but at least they don't look like she's scared out of her wits, so we figured that was a good start. (But really, she's a lot cuter in person!) She arrived a week and a half ago from McPaws, the local animal shelter, and she is settling in great. She does have a few issues that need work (like a dreadful fear of the camera), and trying to sleep on our bed when we're not around (not OK), but considering she's spent about a third of her life in prison she's adjusting quite well. She could care less for rawhide bones, which seems rather strange for a dog (we even tried spreading so bacon grease on it, but it was a no go!). However, she is madly in love with tennis balls. If you ever want to be her friend just start throwing a tennis ball for her and she will think you're the greatest!

Unfinished Projects

To kick things off for this post here is a before and after picture of our crawl space. Someone built a bomb proof little room around 90% of the plumbing. It had double layers of plastic underneath the plywood and insulation in the floor, walls, and ceiling. All that sounds great at first except when the water comes from inside (pipes breaking) the water has nowhere to go. Underneath this little room was an extremely large culture of fluffy white mold. It looked like a cotton candy machine escaped and was stock piling a private stash! Anyway, it is gone now as you can see in the second picture.

Although the moldiness is gone there is still a lot of other leftovers piled in the crawl-space. At some point they need to be gone but for now there are more pressing projects.

The water pipes are still a tangled mess but there is now a mostly finished frame supporting the manifold. The part that is finished is critical to continuing plumbing projects but the rest will have to wait a while.

With that finished we were able to plumb the supply water to the washing machine but the drain is still on the other side of the room which presents a problem. Luckily we have garden hoses that are no longer needed to fill buckets to haul to the toilet.

Next, the dryer. The plug is wired and mounted but the vent hose has nowhere to go. We are planning on having stackables in the future and we are uncertain about the best location for the vent. This house has enough random large holes in the walls for now so we want to be very certain it's in the right place. It's a little red-neck but the window is a relatively convenient alternative.

Finally the wood stove. In the past this poor stove must have had a bad injury that required surgery. It appears to have a prosthetic door. It is a fine replacement for the original except the surgeon never got a chance to replace it's belly button (the door vent). With a spare part from the sad little stove that was in our master bedroom and a little bit of elbow grease the stove now has a functional vent. The action is not that great but it's at least as good as a belly button.

Move In Week

It has been quite a while since we posted an update but now we have tons of exciting things to share with you all. The very first is that we moved into our house on the first of March. That was the day we had the city turn on the water. Unfortunately that didn't mean we had all the comforts of home. The leaky main valve was plumbed directly into a garden hose that ran into the kitchen. From there we could conveniently fill buckets to haul to our upstairs toilet, which thankfully was in mostly working order. We could also run the hose to the kitchen sink where with some extremely high pressure, ice cold water we could fill the sink with water to do dishes. But these conditions didn't last long. Our plumbing supply order arrived and the water works began. First, with some quick water shut off and turn on by the good folks at McCall Public Works, we got a fresh main valve installed.

Next came the heart of our brand new water system: the manifold. This beautiful contraption distributes water separately to each fixture with a shut off for each one. It's not quite properly mounted yet and therefore our PEX water lines are making the crawl-space look like a rats nest, along with all the old plumbing that will eventually be discarded.

Wow! What a mess right? Hopefully we will be able to organize it better in the future.

The next exciting feature was this box to cover the wire runs on the outside of the house to the breaker box. This is also not currently installed properly but will be in the future.

With the main portion of the box in place we were free to wire as many circuits as we pleased. The result: Range, Furnace, Dryer, and Water Heater.

Which takes us to our next and possibly most exciting point... the water heater. We should start this one off with a word to the frugal. I often pays to check the functionality of something that has been discarded, however you will probably make a bigger mess than expected. This is where we found our water heater when we bought the place. It was frozen solid! After hanging out in the house melting and draining it seemed there was not much chance it would work... but what the heck they are pretty straight forward to swap out if it didn't work.

And... Walla! Well not right away. After a few baseball slides into the crawl-space to shut off the water a more convenient shut off was in order. (Should have thought of that sooner, or at least looked at another water heater to see the proper way to set it up.) Finally after dumping about ten gallons of water on the floor a new pressure relief valve solved our issues.

No need to buy a water heater we now have cold AND hot water to the kitchen sink!

And the upstairs bathroom, with some minor leaking issues at the fixtures. Now we just need to find our shower curtain in all our boxes of stuff so we can take a hot shower. Don't worry we did get showers this week at Tenessa and Brandi's house (the friends we've been staying with for the last three and a half months).

This mornings breakthrough was to wire the receptacle for the range. The dryer isn't quite ready to go yet.

There are plenty more details we don't have time to share right now so we will wrap up with a peak into the world of the previous tenants. They may not have been any good at construction (e.g. laying tile over linoleum), but at least they had a sense of humor!