New House Blog: Episode XXIIII - By The Numbers

Welcome back, friends, family, well-wishers, acquaintances, and random blog readers.  We thought that this would be a good time to share with you some house work statistics.  And we start with the number 2.  There are 2 questions that are tied for the most frequently asked questions about our new house; "When are you going to move?" and, "Have you moved yet?"  Do not fret - we will publicly announce when we have moved into our house.  Until such time, we kindly request that these two questions be avoided.  Another number is 2, but this is a different 2.  2 is the number of people who have actually come to our house to help us out, although we have received useful advice, and sometimes equipment, from several people.

Thank you  Amy for coming over once more and helping us out again.

Materials used, to date:
 - Two 520" rolls of plumbers tape.  520" is 45'.  We are actually well into the third roll.
 - Three 3# tubs of drywall joint compound.  And more is going to be needed.
 - Eight gallons of interior paint.  We are using Behr Ultra Premium semigloss paint and primer in one.
 - Three standard tubes of various caulking.
 - 2 bags of grass seed.  We just want to have something growing in our lawn.
 - About one small tub of spackle.
 - A little bit of plumbers putty.
 - Nine or ten paint rollers.
 - At least twelve paint brushes of various sizes.
 - Several rolls of blue shop towels.

We're sure that some/all of these numbers will go up as we continue to work on our house.

Upstairs Bathroom

The upstairs bathroom work is done, as far as we know.  In this very short Episode you saw the new mirror and shower curtain.  Now we show you the new cabinet and bathtub/shower fixtures.  Our first picture shows the new cabinet and an overview of the new bath hardware.

That cabinet looks familiar.

Now for some close-ups.  As you can see, the new fixtures are of the brushed nickel finish, like most of the other new plumbing fixtures so far.

The new spout

The new handle

The new shower head

Replacing the spout and shower head were pretty straightforward, but replacing the handle was quite labor-intensive. The first issue to surface was the fact that the new handle did not fit on the existing valve. Fortunately, the new handle came with a new valve. The second issue to arise was the fact that the old valve had female threads and the new valve has male threads. This meant we would have to redo at least some of the in-wall piping.  Here's a picture of the old valve.

The dark smudge around the missing tile indicates where the old, octagonal faceplate was.

















Fortunately, the other side of the wall is the master bedroom's closet, so the plumbing was very accessible.  The first section of wall we opened up was the wrong section - it was the neighbor of the section containing the bathtub pipes.  We opened up the correct wall section and set to work.  Here is a picture of the old piping.  The green color in the pictures is the result of me, Bish, using the closet wall to roll out excess paint when we painted the bathroom.  This closet is not on our list of to-be-painted rooms.

Yes, I painted on the pipes.

Note the erroneously-opened section of wall on the right.  Note also the lack of any shutoff valves.
















We decided to add shutoff valves because it seemed like a good idea, and we would have to rebuild at least part of the piping anyway.  We also decided to add an access panel to the wall so that if we ever have to use our new shutoff valves we won't have to make a new hole in the wall.  Here's the rough schematic we took to Home Depot when we were figuring out what we would need for rebuilding this pipe setup.

The third issue to rear its ugly head was the fact that the holes for the shower head, tub spout, and valve are not vertically aligned.  That is to say, they form a straight line with each other, but that line is not plumb - it is skewed a bit - not enough to be noticeable from the tub side, but enough to make it much more difficult to connect up all of the pipes.  Eventually we figured it out and everything is working and there are no leaks.

It may not be obvious, but the pipe is not truly plumb.

This is a closeup of one of the new shutoff valves and some of the new piping.

The patched wall and access panel

Since this wall in in a closet, we may leave it rough and as-is for the time being.  It will probably not be part of the normal house tour.

Grass Seed

We now move on to something only marginally plumbing related.  We spread a bunch of new grass seed in the front yard with the aim of just having something growing.  We chose Scotts combination mulch, seed, and fertilizer because the packaging looks good, we don't know a whole lot about the different kinds of grasses (and we don't care too much as long as it's green), and it says in big letters that it is guaranteed to grow anywhere.

New Team Member

As we do sometimes, we are introducing a new member of our yard/gardening team.  Meet Winston.  Winston is a standard wood-handled (Have we mentioned that we mostly prefer wood-handled gardening tools?) garden rake from OSH.  Winston was very useful in our grass-sowing campaign.

Random Bonus Information

The name of the paint color used in the kitchen and laundry room is Opal Cream.

If you were a number, what number would you be?
   bIsh