It has taken us a long time to get to this point. Specifically, 2 1/2 years since we bought the house, almost 2 years since we moved in and about 13 months since we started working on the upstairs (not counting the gut job we did a week after we bought it). As we mentioned before, we have the pressure of a 2nd kid on the way to push us to turn our 2 bedroom back into the 4 bedroom that it started as. And while we’re at it, we thought why not raise the ceiling and add a bathroom? In retrospect, it’s probably ideas like those that cause our projects to take so much longer than they feel like they should. Here’s a quick update of what I wrapped up during my “vacation” last week…

Chloe’s room. In the 2nd picture, you can see the cavity that will eventually house a pocket door, one of the greatest inventions of all time:

Bathroom. This room also gets a pocket door. I threw in and old picture so you can see how we stole some space out of Chloe’s room and the main room to create the bath. In that picture you can see the old closet doorway, the right side of which was where the dividing wall between rooms originally was.

Main room insulation and vapor barrier completed.  I didn’t take any pictures of the front room (the new baby’s), but it is also ready to go.

We can now start getting bids from drywallers.  We’re going to hire it out, because we want to finish sometime this year, not sometime this decade…

I took last week off work, so I got 7 days of work in. This is exactly what our upstairs project needed to get over the hump. Since we’re expecting a baby in July, we are feeling a new pressure to get upstairs finished. Our 4 bedroom house has effectively been 2, since we gutted the upstairs before we moved in and didn’t even start working on it until a year ago. Last January we certainly didn’t think that we’d still be working on it a year later, but you know how those things go!

This is our first experience with PEX (polyethlyene) water lines, and I gotta say that I am hooked. While I associate copper with “quality” plumbing, the difference in labor and effort is massive. To run copper from our basement to the new upstairs bathroom would have been a monster project. Lots of joints in tight places for both the hot and cold lines. With the PEX, I was able to run both lines as single, continuous piece. With copper I would have inevitably ended up with a leak somewhere in the middle, forcing me to drain the line and repair it while trying not to set the house on fire. With this stuff I just uncoiled it and fed it through joists and up our closet chase and up into the bathroom.

PEX lines in new 1/2 bath, along with partially completed vent:

Drain line in closet and in basement:

Maze of pipes at mini water heater. I always vow to keep it simple, but my plumbing always ends up looking like this. I’m addicted to shutoff valves, since they make it so easy to work on future projects, such as the future basement bath remodel. Now I can just work on the new pipes without having to shut off water to anything else. That’s a big deal after you’ve spent entire days without a toilet or shower because the water had to be shut off. The 2nd picture shows one of the PEX lines connected to the copper. There are 2 varieties of PEX connectors, the “official” ones that’d be used by a plumber and require a $100 crimper (or $200 if you’re working with 2 sizes) and the “Joe Homeowner” ones I used. They are pricy (about $5/connector), but they’re really cool to use. You literally just plug the pipe into it. It’s that simple. And if you have to change something later, you can pull back a spring-loaded clip and pull the pipe back out. I can’t imagine anything easier than that!

Over the last two years, we have progressively developed one of the most complicated water heating systems in the world. At least it feels that way. I have written previously about our problems with our defective tankless water heater and its recent resolution. As much as we love our tankless heater, there is no avoiding the fact that they pretty much suck when it comes to the little stuff (i.e. handwashing and dishwashing). They require a minimum flow rate to kick on and a sustained flow to stay on. If you aren’t using a constant stream, as with a shower or filling a washing machine, you will end up with a pattern of hot/cold/hot/cold/hot water in your pipe. While this is tolerable for washing your hands, it can be a real shock when you’re trying to shave.

Because we don’t like the idea of wasting a ton of water Continue Reading »

We woke up in the middle of the night to what we thought was our daughter running the bathroom faucets at full blast. When I went around the corner to tell her to turn them down, I noticed two things. First, she was not in the bathroom, and even more worrisome, the water was coming from below the sink, not above it! It was spraying gushers out of one of the supply valves. After turning off the valve and mopping up the mess, I was left wondering how this could have happened. Any time I’ve seen a washer or seal give way, it always starts with a few drops or a trickle. This one went from perfectly normal to fire hose in a single step. Because our daughter had a bad cold and had woken us up about a dozen times during the night, I was tired enough to put it out of my mind and just go back to sleep. While I recognized and appreciated the fact that we had narrowly avoided a disaster (what if it had been during the day or while we were on vacation?), that wasn’t enough to keep me awake. Continue Reading »

This is a follow-up to my original post about our Bosch 635ES (250SX) water heater, which you can find here.

My first post was a recap of all the problems that we’ve had with this heater over the last two years. Tonight’s post is a very happy one. About 10 days after I sent my long email to Bosch detailing all the steps I’ve taken to remedy the startup noise issue, I finally received a reply. I had given up hope, since they promise responses within 24 hours and an earlier one I had sent months ago went unanswered. Imagine my shock when I read these words:

Hello Julio,

I am sorry to hear that you are having so much trouble with your water heater. I would like to offer a possible solution. Since you have tried to dial in the air/gas mixture to no avail, I think that we should swap your heater for a new one. Please call our toll free tech support line at (866)330-2730 and we can set this procedure up. I have updated your record to reflect this so any tech you talk to should get it going quickly.Thanks for buying Bosch.

Continue Reading »