The loved/hated trip to Home Depot guaranteed a late start and a shorter workday today. However, some progress was made, so I’m feeling pretty good about things. Plumbing is usually one of my slower “skills,” so it’s great when it doesn’t fight me too much.

Holes cut in flooring for supply/drain pipes for upstairs. These will get boxed in once it’s all done. Or, more likely, in the week before we put the house on the market. And no, we have no plans to do so, but how high of a priority will this be when other parts of our house are still inhabitable? I didn’t get the drain pipe all the way up to this point today, but it’ll eventually work its way towards the upstairs through this hole, along with the supply lines.

In the basement, I took out the sink, which has to be moved due to being directly in the path of where I had to run the 3″ drain for the new upstairs bath. I removed the cleanout assembly that I had put in two years ago and replaced it with a 45°fitting to allow me to connect the new drain line to the main stack. I use pieces of leftover wire to help me hold the pipes in place as I install them. I always find this to be the trickiest part…trying to get everything cut, glued and installed with the proper slope. I have to add a disclaimer that all the sloppy wiring visible in this picture was not done by me! It was a gift from the previous owner. When we eventually get around to redoing this bath, it’ll all get cleaned up!

Our house has a 2nd stairwell to the upstairs, which we think is pretty unusual in a house of this size (approx 2000′ sq. ft., not including the basement). However, it was long ago sealed up to create enough floor space for an additional bedroom in the upstairs. We have also opted to keep the extra square footage, because we need two bedrooms upstairs and like being able to use the stairway as an extra closet. We are seriously closet-deficient in this house, so we take anything we can get!

This stairway is also the only available and feasible location for running our new plumbing for the future 1/2 bath upstairs. We’ll be running the supply and drain lines over on the right hand side of the stairwell. The bottom two treads have been removed and the holes cut into the basement, but we haven’t taken an pictures yet. These “before” pictures will have to do for now. We’ll add more soon if we have time to work on it tomorrow…

We have had a love/hate relationship with our water heater for 2 years now. It’s a Bosch 635ES (aka 250SX) tankless, which for the most part, we love. It’s energy efficient and is great when we have guests and need to do 4 or 5 showers in a row (or even run 2 showers at once). So what’s the problem?

Noise. Since day one, this heater has made one of two different noises:

• A loud, combustion-engine-sounding, house-shaking groan/grunt upon startup, and/or
• A loud whistle during operation that can be heard a block away

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OK, so we didn’t do any work on the house today, but we wanted to put up a picture of the snow we woke up to this morning. It’s so rare to get a good snow in Portland that everyone is out building snowmen, sledding or taking pictures of their houses. Or maybe that’s just us…

We have been tagged by the nice folks at Tiny Oak Park Bungalow. They asked to list five things that other housebloggers probably don’t know about us. Since we’re new arrivals to houseblogs.net, we’re guessing we could write just about anything and it would be news. OK - let’s see… Continue Reading »

We moved the site and all posts over to a new host. The migration from Typepad to Wordpress wasn’t quite as easy as hoped, but it wasn’t too bad in the end…