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Showing posts with the label plumbing

New Kitchen Sink Fully Installed

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T he remainder of the plumbing parts I had ordered for our new kitchen sink installation project arrived last night.  This was good news because they weren't projected to arrive until early next week.  I successfully jumped on what little still needed to be done first thing this morning.  Now the new sink is fully functional! I needed some additional plumbing parts to connect the drain of the smaller sink basin to our waste plumbing so that delayed me in finishing up this relatively easy project.   The drains of our new sink do not line up exactly the same as our old sink so that was the first difference I needed to resolve.  The other difference is that the basins of the new sink are two different depths while both basins of the old sink were at the same depth.  The large basin of our new sink is at nine inches deep while the smaller basin is only eight inches deep.  The different depths really screwed up connecting the new sink to the drain.  I thought this would be quite easy to

Unplanned Dirty, Stinky, Nasty Repair

First thing this morning, I noticed that the bathroom sink was not draining.  I don't mean it was slow or sluggish.  I mean it was not draining.   We had to run to the Post Office as early as possible this morning to ship a couple of packages but I knew I would now have a frustrating morning ahead of me once we arrived back home. I had a pretty good idea that the rather long drain pipe running to the side wall was probably clogged with hair, gunk, soap and I don't want to know what else.  This would mean that I would need to disassemble the drain.  I decided to just check the trap under the sink first though just in case this could be a relatively simple problem to resolve. I emptied out the long vanity cabinet and then went looking for a bucket.  I placed the bucket under the trap and disassembled the trap...  nasty, foul water spilled out...  but the trap didn't have as much gunk in it as I thought it would or should considering the sink wasn't draining at all.  "

New Year Off To A Very Bad Start

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Actually, the last two weeks of 2017 and the first three weeks (so far) of 2018 have been exceptionally lousy but this is giving me a very uneasy feeling about this new year.  In our case, it seems that things are constantly breaking. If it is not one thing, it is another. Touch this... it breaks. Look at something else... it breaks. Fix something... turn around and there are two other things broken. The list is so long at this point that I can't even remember everything that has broken in the past four weeks! The first two problems I can remember four weeks ago were related to our electrical and our furnace.  Our electronics were all acting a bit odd and quirky. Things were shutting down on their own. Other things weren't working correctly. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting with an electronics tester, I found myself at our circuit-breaker panel with the cover off testing the monster main lines coming into the house (something I'd prefer to avoid) ... the vol

A New Sink and Faucet

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New sink and faucet installed in our old cabinets. Our renovation plans include a garden window in place of the window in this photo. We're planning to completely gut and renovate the kitchen as soon as we have time and some cooperative health (for both of us!) . In the meantime, we're storing away new building supplies for this project.  We've had a new kitchen sink and faucet sitting here for a few months while the old sink and faucet continued to drive us crazy everyday. The old sink was too small... the faucet was a poor quality one with very little clearance between the sink and the spout... the sink was dented and old... and the sprayer hasn't worked correctly in years. This stuff needed to be replaced years ago. Since the sink and faucet were just sitting there on the floor, I decided to do something about it the other day. I've replaced sinks and faucets in the past and, typically , this is a quick and easy project requiring no more than one to two

Is It Friday Yet?

It hasn't been what I would call a "terrible" week but, what the heck? As you probably already have heard, we had planned some extensive home renovations for the end of summer and early autumn but Sheila developed cancer again so we put all the renovations on hold until sometime after Sheila's recovery. We're now stuck in a cluttered house full of building supplies.  Over the past week or two, Sheila and I have been discussing what to do with all this clutter. I quickly decided to start finding a long term temporary home for each of the building supplies taking up our living space.  The kitchen and living room renovation is the biggest part of this project which is now on indefinite hold. We have Birch flooring, a lot of lighting fixtures, electrical supplies, windows, a range hood, a new faucet, a new kitchen sink, lumber, etc, all cluttering our home.  Yesterday, I decided to just go ahead and complete a little project... install that new kitchen sink an

A Little More Progress

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My spine was feeling "fair" this morning... which, honestly, is about as good as it gets... so I decided I should attempt to finish up this bathroom toilet project.   I took a day or two off from this project because I needed some galvanized deck screws for me to screw down the subflooring as well as for screwing down the flange. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any among all my tools. Also, my spinal injuries were screaming at me for a break. When I placed the new toilet over the flange to see how it fits (between the wall and the flange) I realized that I forgot to pick up a new longer braided stainless steel supply hose. This new toilet is an ADA toilet so it sits a bit higher than the old toilet...  that means a slightly longer run to the tank from our toilet supply shutoff... so I needed to purchase a 16" or 20" supply hose. On Monday night, we first went to a local hardware store to pick up these rather standard building materials... that was a complete

A Plumbing Scheduled Maintenance Day

Before I used the bathroom for the first time today, Sheila had already started laundry. Typically, that is no problem but as I was trying to wash my face and brush my teeth, the water pressure in my faucet diminished to a trickle. " Hmmm... that isn't right..."  I immediately knew it was time to change the whole-house water filter so I jumped right into that project. This is the first time I had to change the filter cartridge in this particular whole-house water filter since I installed it a few months ago. I've replaced many water filters in our old whole-house filter but this was the first time with this newer model so it required me to pull out the instructions. It took a little extra time to figure it all out but the filter change was painless. I removed the old, dirty filter cartridge that came with this filter and installed a better charcoal filter.  This set the ball in motion for today. I spent some time on our plumbing doing some regular maintenance. Thi

An Exceptionally Busy Weekend

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I haven't written anything in about a week and a half because I've had some exceptionally lousy health and, more recently, I've been busy working on the house and out in the yard during my good health. Working on the house only happened after taking a few weeks off because of spinal problems. I managed to have a productive and busy weekend but I didn't get to touch a single thing that has been on my long 'to-do list'.   On Saturday afternoon, we had a broken water supply pipe due to repeated stress. The pipe just broke completely in two! The water was shooting out of the broken pipe like a garden hose with a nozzle on it! Water was everywhere! Our vanity was filled with water, soaking everything in the vanity. The flooring was soaked. On the positive side, the adjoining bedroom is a construction zone so no finished materials were damaged. The problem was gaining quick and easy access at a time when we needed to move quickly to minimize damage. The wate

Bathroom Project Update

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Plumbing for the washing machine and pedestal sink... Overall, things have been very quiet in the house for the past month as my health recovers from a painful dip which, at this point, has sapped most of my energy. I'm getting a bit bored and antsy laying around doing nothing but my energy level is still so low that it is impossible to accomplish a thing. On top of that, I spent a good portion of last night in the bathroom, sick, rather than sleeping... those are always fun times! (sarcasm) There have, however, been a few mornings during the past month when I felt that I had enough energy for an hour or so of work. On these few days I did manage to get a little bit accomplished on our bathroom project.   I needed to get a bit creative with all the plumbing to make it fit in this small space. In this first photo, at right, you can see some odd 45 degree angles to help make things fit. There was absolutely no room for sweeping elbows!  The waste line running up on the ri

Toughest Part of the Waste Plumbing Project

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Last weekend, I decided it was time to tackle the most difficult part of the waste plumbing project for our new half bathroom. Designing this plumbing was a bit of a challenge because of the very tight, cramped quarters. Not only is everything very close together providing little room for pipes to change directions, but there was very little room to work! Part of my struggles with Systemic Mastocytosis includes cognitive difficulties as well so this hindered my ability to effectively design a drainage plan for this new bathroom.  I must have been having an unusually good day a few weeks ago when I finally was able to clearly envision what I needed to do and I was able to sketch some plans. What is photographed here wass the first part of this project... cutting into the existing waste line and installing a new waste line with fittings for the new toilet, pedestal lavatory, our washing machine, and two new plumbing vents to the roof... all in a very tiny space!  I'm no small