New Lights for the Baths and Kitchen

My First house project on the new place?
Rip out the dirty nasty non functional halogen puck lights under the counters and replace them with nice fluorescent lights.

Here's the old ripped out lights...it really looked like they were installed and wired by retarded monkeys...

And voila the new lights are in! At least there was a switched outlet on top of the cabinets to plug them into. The switch to the left of the sink turns them on.

Here's me futzing with the light on the other side of the stove.
Now I just need to change the overhead light to CF only fixture and I should be title 24 compliant.

Lots of blanked off wall plates in the house. This one is over baby madscientists vanity....

Yay fire!!!! Everyone know's we love fire....but not in my electrical boxes.

Bought new lights for the babies bath and our bath...unfortunately the glass for one of them showed up like this....

Here's the lights we chose. What do y'all think? We looked at a lot of lights....lots and lots and lots of lights...

The lights for the babies bath. Pancake boxes suck.

Here's the same lights installed in our bath. We are thinking of using this line through out the house.

In this shot you can see the medicine cabinet I installed also..yay some storage and a mirror...cept our sink is some how totally plugged....I looked down the drain and gaa...its packed solid with what looks like hair!! ugh...

What Lies Ahead Part 2

When last we left off we were talking about the permits that we have that are due to expire this October. For fun here is a clip of the section of the plans that go along with the permit.

Here was the existing bottom floor as we found it. Love how the garage enters into the unit via the bathroom? and how the middle bedroom can only be entered through the bathroom also! Talk about a multi-use space.

Below we have the after that we're supposed to have finished by Oct! Sorry about the small size if you click on the picture its readable-ish. Wow, look at all that stuff!! What was I thinking! Basically the only parts of the above that are done are the slab-foundation, the radiant heating, the tankless water heater and some of the earthquake retro-fitting! That means we've got to do all the plumbing still, the wiring, I've got to actually install a kitchen! the bathroom(which is on a seperate permit), frame out the garage and utility closets, insulate and sheet rock everything! Just basically finish everything!

Ya, it'll just take a couple of weekends right!?!?!

Sheesh, what'd I get myself into!

Future Plans for the House

Well I guess I should really say 'Future Near-Term Plans for the House'.

We've decided that while I've got some extra 'free time' now that I'd apply myself to getting some projects done around the house. We have an f-ton of permits expiring starting in October so we've got to try to close as many of them out as possible or else we'll be on the hook for the fees all over again AND for any changes in the building codes since the permit was pulled.
The giant foundation-entire downstairs permit is the first to expire in the beginning of Oct. so we're hoping that we can get as much of that complete as possible. We should be able to complete everything but the drywalling (can't do the drywalling because lots of framing, plumbing is going to have to be added to the area when we redo the top two floors) by the drop dead date...that won't close the permit out but we're hoping stuff that was signed off on won't have to be re-inspected.

Job 1 is turning this room into a full bath. We'll finally have a bathroom on the ground floor so people won't have to go upstairs to potty during patio parties.

We've already got the permits to do this so its just a matter of time...
I get to learn how to hang doors during this project. I'm going to plumb this bath with PEX tubing so we'll see how that goes with the building dept.
I'll do a more in-depth post on just the bathroom with the floor plan and stuff later.

We bought the bathroom vanity a while ago...I think there was a sale or something....here's the back of it, pretty exciting huh!

We already have the toilet too! Its a super cool wall hung unit that looks like a regular toilet-not all super high-tech and inappropriate for a Victorian bathroom.

Its an elongated bowl and since its wall hung we can set it at any height we like! Hello 20" seat height! I can't wait to use this baby! Actually, it will be good for when we're elderly and can't bend our knees so well...

This is the plumbing for the shower. Notice how its above the concrete floor? Ya this is going to be interesting....we're going to have to build some sort of raised mortar bed-platform thingy to get the level of the shower floor correct.

On the back of the house we need to rebuild the back stairs (we get to cut our first stair stringers hurray!!) and make them code compliant to get the back deck amnestied.

If we're lucky we can get the stairs to land on the edge of the sunken living room. We need to get rid of that ramp its outright dangerous when its wet and or you're drunk...

Here's an up close shot of the jury-rigged stair stringer. That vertical post is just kinda wedged in there and that horizontal member is just nailed up to a deck post....not real-super secure.

Our neighbor who we share this fugly bit of fence with would really, really like to redo it. We basically can never see this fence unless we go looking for it. But because it shares a border and its currently built on our side of the property line I'm going to get roped into , designing, spec'ing, making the lumber run and over-seeing the work being done...what fun. The neighbor who stares at this fence all day long, wants a fancy fence with an arbor top....which is fine, but much more expensive than what we want, which is just a basic well built fence that will last a long while and contain her dogs....hopefully we can come up with some sort of equitable compromise.

Now, what Irene really wants is to replace this section of fence which we stare at all day long with something that's not falling down and attractive looking. Unfortunately this is with a different neighbor who doesn't seem to care about it so we might be footing the bill to redo this section of fence ourselves.

On the left at the bottom of the fence, do you see how rotted the bottom of the fence boards are? That's because they were literally underground by that much from all the accumulated debris that the previous owner had spread around the backyard....

a half bathroom??

I can't tell you how excited I am about the work Dan did over the weekend!! we totally have the beginnings of a bathroom downstairs!

I'm tempted to install the toilet soon, just so we could really call it a half-bath, even though it'll be awhile till we get to the finishing touches. Like walls..


I guess it wouldn't make much sense to have the toilet until we get the water lines run.. and if we're going to do that, we might as well go ahead and run some electricity too.. and by that there no sense not going the full monte and having walls and a floor.. maybe a sink too..

Well, it's still exciting. This is the beginning of the structure and renovation of our house. The foundation, and even the driveway was really just fixing what was here so we could get started. This feels like really getting started.







And Dan got to play with his toys!

This laser level has saved our sanity on many occasions (when we get to the kitchen I'll tell you about the 2 different types of people in the world: people who want the cabinets to be level, and people who want the cabinets to look level.. ne'er the twain shall meet)

Once the walls were up, we measured and chalked out where all the fixtures will be.. turns out the plumber that did the work with the foundation job put the stub-out
for the toilet a few inches further from the wall than it was supposed to be (the green lawn chair in the last picture is our stand-in for the toilet), which in a bathroom this size might as well have been a mile.. so we're going to have to move it. So much for paying other people to do the work..



The framing nailer made such short work of the walls that Dan went through and put blocking in for the grab bars. We're making this bathroom as ADA compliant as we can in such a small space.. When we're too old to get up to our master bedroom suite in the attic we're planning to move in down there and live out the rest of our days, and we want to make it as comfortable as possible for our parents in the meantime.

And now the hallway looks like a hallway :)

The Saga of the Shorty Showerhead

This was our showerhead. It's nice enough, it has fantastic water pressure, coming from a time when there was an endless water supply. But it was short. My dear husband had to either duck down to get underneath it, or stand way back against the wall. So we bought a nice little extender arm and a pretty new showerhead. What's easier than swapping out a showerhead?? not much, really.. but sometimes it's not as easy as it ought to be.


This is the ball joint at the end of the shower arm. Apparently, it was rather standard back in the day, but I'd never seen one before.
No problem, I said.. it's got a threaded fitting. Surely there is an adaptor for it.







This is the standard adaptor for the fitting. The picture clearly illustrates my typical experience with "one size fits all."

There was one other adaptor, but the threads on it were completely wrong. The nice man at the fantastic hardware store down the street told me to just swap out the shower arm. But I was nervous about doing that because it disappeared behind the wall so far that I couldn't see where it connected to the pipe. How could I see if the new joint leaked if I couldn't see the connection? He thought that made sense, so he gave me the number of a nearby plumbing place that he thought would have the fitting. They didn't have anything either. "Swap out the shower arm," they told me. "It's probably only half an inch back into the wall." When yet another plumbing store told me the same thing, I gave in and bought the $3 shower arm and decided to try my luck. Plus, I bought a cool strap wrench so I wouldn't scratch any of the shiny new chrome.

Here's the shiny new shower arm sticking out of the wall. It connects to the pipe 2.5" inches back inside the wall! But the whole bathroom is going to be redone anyway, so at the very worst we'd have a little more rot in the wall we're going to tear out anyway. Doesn't seem to be leaking though.. I put some teflon tape on to be sure, which is more than was there before.

Not a scratch on it!





Here's the new extender arm that crumpled while I was tightening it. That joint was like a sprinkler when I turned the water on.

The next one I used my cool new strap wrench on, and it went smashingly.




And here - drumroll, please - is the fully operational, husband-height, non-leaking, non-scratched, non-crumpled showerhead. You can shut the water off by turning the head, which I think is a much better way to save water than trying to clean off under a super-low-flow drippy showerhead!

You can see that I left the escutcheon off.. with the hanging shower caddy it always hung down anyway..


This just in.. apparently it's somewhat difficult to turn the water back on while your hands are all soapy.. but I don't think it's anything a washcloth couldn't fix.

So the saga ends.. next up, the washing machine!