Back in February, we had a little incident with our sink supply line suddenly popping its gasket and shooting water out in our downstairs bathroom.  I had replaced the defective semi-rigid supply line with a new hose and had intended to change out the other as soon as I could.  Well, as with most things house-related, even things you panic about can lose their crisis status after being ignored for a few days.  Every once in awhile I’d think about it and say to myself “I really should change that out before it fails.”  And then I’d do nothing.  Yesterday I finally remembered to pick up a new hose and swapped it out.  Now I can stop losing sleep at night (actually, I wasn’t, which was why it took me so long to do it…)

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 »

We finally got around to taking a nice picture of our finished bathroom. It’s amazing how good the wide angle lense makes things look!

By the time we we purchased our bungalow in 2004, it had been abused as a rental house for well over a decade. As you might expect, none of the original lighting remained (with the exception of the brass fitters in the living and dining room box beams.) Sadly, everything else was long gone, but don’t feel too sorry for us - we definitely had fun choosing new lighting!

We selected copper-foiled Tiffany-style stained glass shades from Rejuvenation for our living room sconces, box beam fixtures and dining room chandelier.

In our kitchen, we used five Arts and Crafts style pendant fixtures from Progress Lighting. (To tie the fixtures together with the rest of the room, we installed matching carmel-swirled glass panels in the cabinets flanking our refrigerator.)

For our ground floor bathroom, we chose sconces and overhead lighting from Schoolhouse Electric

In our front entry hall, we used another stained glass fixture from Rejuvenation which incorporated all of our paint colors from the entry hall, living room and dining room, which really helps tie the ground floor together.

We finished the sink, toilet and tub shorty after finally moving into the house. We have added some minor touches since these pictures, so look for some more in the future.

We completed the window and door trim and the wainscotting.  We modeled the wainscotting design to mimic that of the dining room.  We are very fortunate to have McCoy Millwork here in Portland, from which we bought the cove/crown moulding for the tops of the windows and doors.  While not an exact match for the house’s original moulding, it is very similar and adds a strong dose of authenticity to the appearance of our bathroom (and kitchen, too).  You cannot buy trim like this at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

We  purchased a new Milgard window, because the old one was completely falling apart.  While we try to reuse as much as possible, sometimes it’s just not all that practical.  If the old window had had any aesthetic or vintage value, we would have put more effort into saving it.  Since it was a complete mess, we felt better about installing a new, energy efficient Marvin window.  We used Marvins for all our downstairs replacement windows, since the wood interior trim goes very well with our house.  The no-maintenance aluminum exteriors actually look quite good and will hold up well over time.

We filled up this dumpster with wood to be recycled and another one twice the size with trash.  Julio’s brother Carmen was in town to help, and together the two of them carried over 11,000 lbs. from the back patio and 2nd floor down the twenty steps to the street level.  They both slept very well that night…