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!
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