Much of yesterday and today was spent on home improvement store runs and clearing out Ginger’s room. I took this week off of work, and our goal is to have her room 100% done and the rest of the upstairs as close to that as possible. There are still little bits of trim work to do in all the rooms, and it’s amazing how many hours can be thrown into finishing a “done” space. My plan is to try to do all the sawing outside, to avoid kicking a bunch of dust into Chloe’s room, but today’s weather didn’t really cooperate with that idea. So, I opted to start the less fun task of starting to patch and mud the plaster walls on either side of the stairs. Our goal is to merge the 15 or so various textures on those two walls into a semi-cohesive look, even if it’s not perfect. And then we’ll paint the walls and rip the carpet off the stairs, so that they can be refinished. We’ve pretty much decided to hire someone else to do it, in line with our “save our sanity” plan that we committed to in our last post. Hopefully by paying for help on a few things we’ll squelch our desire to just move away from all these projects. Even today when dropping $400+ at lumber yards for “a few little things” to finish Ginger’s room, I was dreaming of how nice it’d be to be able to spend that money on something else…or even not spend it at all… So, without further ado, here’s the super-exciting kickoff picture…

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!

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…