Summer's Over - AKA "The Smurf Pipe Adventure"

So it officially became Fall on Tuesday, and I recognize that my last post was around July 4th.. Where has the time gone? Well this time, I know exactly where it went. It went into an extreme bathroom makeover for the ages..

So, without further ado, (and many thanks to my Dad for his help, and my Mom for letting Rach and the kids crash at her house for the weekend!!) Our Extreme Bathroom Makeover is now complete: I will try and let the pics speak for themselves:


Post Demolition: (Complete Gutting down to studs, removing 3 layers of wall tile, and all copper plumbing from entire house.)



New Toilet, Double Switch (New one added for fan in ceiling), Wainscoting, Fixtures:



Wall Decor, Wainscoting, and Cabinetry:



New Shower Curtain, Sink, Mirror and GFCI Outlet and Wainscoting:



New 3 Panel Shower Surround, Tub and One Handled Faucet:



New Wall Hangers:



New Floor Tile:



The entire house also has new water supply lines!! I removed all the copper and ran new lines with Smurf Pipe and Shark bites.. (Enter Gargamel and fish shaped fruit snacks??). Smurf Pipe you say? So it's called Pex, but my dad calls Pex Tubing Smurf Pipe, because well, it's blue, and he's got a name for everything and so it stuck.. (It also comes in white and red, but all my cold water supply is run in blue.) Needless to say in his over 30 years of construction experience he had not seen this stuff used, so there was some chagrin as he stared up at my runs of blue/white flexible tubing. This shows how the piping can flex and be threaded through holes drilled through floor joists.. Copper doesn't really allow for this:



The connections are made via push to fit shark bite connectors which also work on copper. Crazy, I know! AND Once the connection is made, the connector can rotate on the pipe! Wickedly convenient and super cool.. Here you can see a connection made to an external faucet. In a few spots I left existing copper because of exterior faucets or hard to reach areas: Here is join of pex to copper:



So, Once it was all hooked up, the initial pressure test revealed one tiny leak, which just required me to pull that connection apart, and smooth out the end of that pipe, and reconnect...

All of this supply line work downstairs now allows for the Kitchen Remod to enter it's final phase including dishwasher installation coming in October!!!!

Until Next Time...

Knock A Hole In It!

So, my lovely wife came up with a great idea.. (She's legendary when it comes to good ideas.) We've been pondering for some time a kitchen remodel, but it's a daunting concept. So we started talking about doing it in stages. This would have a three-fold purpose. 1. It will be more cost-effective to do it in chunks instead of all at once. 2. It allows there to be a minimal amount of downtime, when the kitchen is out of commission. (We gotta eat!) 3. It allows us to continue to cultivate and grow more great (legendary) ideas as we go.

Phase One involved three key steps. Replacing the kitchen window, removing the corner and south facing cabinets, and putting a "window" in the kitchen wall between the living room and the kitchen. I have replaced all the bedroom windows so far, so I tackled that first. All went great except, The sill fell off, (a bit rotten) and then in my haste, I chucked it in the trash before I measured it! OOPS! Well, it ended up being a good thing, because I was able to make the new sill a bit longer to accommodate the three inch trim. Oh, and I was a bit rusty on my trim angles, so I get to redo that. ARGH!

Next was ripping out the south facing cabinets. Well ripping those out was about as fun as wrestling a 350 lb. porcupine. I have to say, that without my Grandpa's Go-Devil, this would have been an impossible task. What is a Go-Devil you might ask? Well lets just park this story, and start another one.

A Go-Devil is an infamous, (well almost) Hooten invention. Roy Hooten, (my Grandpa) developed this tool eons ago. I hate to say it, but it's not patented, but it probably should be. A simple person, might just call it a pry bar, but it's way cooler than just that. It's an old leaf spring, (under the truck bed.) that has been cut in half and one end has been rounded off, and ground down to a fine edge. Sounds simple, but the resulting tool is AMAZING! It's a must for replacing windows, or beating rabid squirrels, or prying objects when you don't want to tear up a wall! Many thanks must go to Grandpa Roy for his invention!


Back to the real story. Now comes the fun part. Putting a hole in the wall between the kitchen and the living room! That first hammer blow, was timid. Wait NO it was not! I about drove my hammer through both sides of sheet rock. At that point Rachel went downstairs, because it was well, scary. All in all one of the most fulfilling projects I have attempted yet. Another one of Rach's legendary ideas comes to fruition...





Until Next Time...