A Tale of Our Plumbing Part 1

Imagine our surprise when the first time we ran our dishwasher our sink backed up.

Lovely isn't it? Matt was trying to cook dinner at the time.

It eventually drained, but it kept happening whenever a large volume of water would run through our pipes. So off to the store we went to get some plumbing supplies. We got a snake and a sink plunger to see if it was just a minor clog. Well, the plunger didn't do anything, and the snaking.....the snaking still gives Matt the shivers. The upper part of the drain was clear of anything major. The lower part had a cleanout plug to make snaking simpler.

Very nice clean out plug in the basement

Unfortunately, as Matt found out, part of the issue was the basement lines weren't draining completely. So when that plug came out, instead of the small amount of water that he thought would be in there, a whole half gallon of water, sludge, and rancid "material" came gushing out and soaked him. Luckily, he had a big bucket so it didn't go all over, but, yeah, that was bad.

This is the solid part of the stuff that came out of the line, at least a pound or two.

 To top it all off, there was no blockage in the line.

However, all that water in the line got us thinking, and Matt measured the drop in the plumbing lines. There wasn't a low spot like we first thought, but the line only dropped a 1/2" over a 18' length. Plumbing lines are supposed to drop a 1/4" per foot, so the whole line should have dropped 4.5" over that length. Due to a massive floor joist that can be seen in the picture of the line above, the whole waste line had to be rerouted a whole foot and a half over so that the proper drop could be achieved.

It's always an interesting day when you have to drill five 2.5" holes through things

Hey look, Matt finally remembered to get a before picture!

And here is the after picture!

Finally, after days of trouble shooting and a good 6 hours of work on Sunday, the routing was finished and the problem was ..... still there. Not only did the rerouting of the pipes not fix the drainage issue, (though the pipe slope is amazingly perfect) it made things worse by breaking crud or glue seals on some existing pipes (you can see them buried in the wall in the previous picture, look for the old yellowed pipes). Now our sink backs up, and our pipes in the wall leak like a sieve.

At this point Matt threw in the towel and used the home warranty policy to call a plumber.

Moving in

Sorry for the lack of posts then the huge rush of posts this weekend. We have been preoccupied with moving into the house, and no one wants to see or hear about large piles of boxes being unloaded. Luckily, we are now pretty much done and have many new things to share. We shall try to refrain from mass posting in a weekend again.

The joys of a pre-renovated house

When we bought the house we knew that the whole living room was an addition on the original house. However, as we have been cleaning up, we are starting to realize just how much the house has been changed around from its original form.

While cleaning the basement, we were able to figure out why the "laundry room" area had such odd walls.

Now looking at it, it's obvious it's a stair support

After clearing the cobwebs in the ceiling, we saw an inconsistency in the ceiling joists.

That's not metal...

Turns out that there used to be a stairway down to the basement in the large room. This stairway was under the stairway to the upstairs. The first floor landing for the basement stairway is now the fridge alcove/pantry. The access to the basement has been moved to the new addition. This answers out big question on how the basement was accessed before the addition was put in.

Luckily the work seems done very well and while the subfloor on the first floor has a few small gaps, we are not going to worry about this change and enjoy our much larger basement room.

Just a small gap is all that remains of what used to be a landing

Since the stairs were once all more centrally located, there was also a door at the far end of the kitchen. It explains why the kitchen itself is so wide, the kitchen used to be a major through way in the house. All that remains of the doorway is some cut siding and a small window. The inspector thought it was good, so I am not currently worried about it.

Not only is the vinyl cut, but the stair mounting and the outside light are still up. Luckily this is the back of the house.

Another change we knew had been made to the house from its original specs is that a wall had been taken out between two of the bedrooms on the first floor. This turned two 11'x12' rooms into one long 11'x24' room.

The floor was sealed before the wall was removed

Unlike the basement stairway, this change will most likely be reversed. Danielle and Matt still have some disagreements on exactly how the wall should be added back, but the general consensus is adding back the wall with a large door/opening to allow passage between the two bedrooms.

Now for some changes that we didn't know were there...

What are these strange markings?

This is the closet at the end of the hall. When we looked up at the ceiling, we noticed these markings. This means that this closet was originally part of the small bedroom and it's closet was a couple feet bigger. This was verified by really examining the closet next door. The paneling in the closet is a bit slipshod and mismatched in a couple places. Luckily that is in places not normally seen and the room is going to probably end up as a music room so the closet appearance is not so important.

Finally, the most worrying alteration is this one.

A random wood scrap covered something important!

This is a large hole in the basement. We think it was either the old sump pump hole or a simple drain. Currently the only things in the hole is a drain from the current sump pump and a lower drain leading outside (we think). We would like to cap it or cover it somehow (at least something better than the small plywood piece currently on it), but we are not sure what can be done. Luckily it doesn't seem to be causing any problems and at the very least we can put the washer or dryer over it to prevent someone from falling in it.

One man's trash is .... mostly trash

When the previous owners left the house, they left quite of bit of stuff behind. The basement, in particular, was stuffed full of so much random crap. In part of the cleaning phase, Matt went through the basement and sorted out the trash from the treasures. As you can see most of it was just trash.

Junk

Lots of Junk

Even more junk

However, there was some good stuff among the rubble. The previous owner had quite a few nice pieces of hard and softwood that had been left behind and were undamaged. We also kept quite a bit of unused molding, especially since the house has more than a few walls without it. We think we ended up keeping about a quarter to a third of the stuff left behind, including some building materials like tar paper, unused large diameter PVC pipe, extra drop ceiling parts, and some metal door/window shade tracks.

Some nice pieces of wood and shelving

The majority got moved into Matt's office

Some building material

The biggest finds, however, were a few odd gems left behind. There were some odd and cool things left in that basement. First there was the small TV left upstairs. Then we found a working, though noisy, dehumidifier (it was buried behind a veritable wall of wood pieces; don't know why it wasn't being used). Elsewhere in the basement were two fishtanks - one small, one large -, a wet/dry vacuum, the frosted glass sliding doors from a bathtub (with cool patterns etched in), a extra large easel, and, believe it or not, a collapsible pulpit. There was an old working washer motor (Matt claimed that before Danielle even got a look at it), a good size mirror, and quite a few pieces that look to be from some sort of commercial shelving system (like what would be used to display wares in a store).

Outside in the little plastic shed was even more stuff. It's amazing how much was just left behind. The shed had a riding lawn mower, a wheelbarrow, multiple gardening tools, 2 pairs of sawhorses, one right brake caliper from an unknown car model, and some random cabinetry pieces, including a metal one with a combination lock built in. We knew about the mower, but the neighbors told us it might have been sitting for some time, so Matt now has another task on his list: figure out if the thing still runs or what we would have to do to get it running again.

We realize this was mostly a huge list of stuff and is hard to visualize, but Matt was a huge dolt when he was sorting and forgot to take detailed pictures of everything before he buried it all behind mounds of other stuff. We are not sure what we will do with everything we are keeping, but for now, Matt's deconstructed office is playing storage room.

Useless bench is useless

So something that has been irrationally irritating Matt (even he agrees it is irrational) since we first viewed the house is this weird little bench near where the new HVAC system was installed.

Deconstruction already started since Matt couldn't wait

At first we thought it was part of the HVAC ductwork, but all the known ductwork doesn't seem to enter the bench. In addition, it was almost certainly built into place when the addition was put in and the main door was shrunk. For those who didn't know, the whole yellow family room is an addition to the original house; that is why it is about a foot lower and has no basement under it. Because it bugged Matt to no end, he decided during some downtime to pull the sucker apart. After much coaxing and cursing from Matt and just plain belligerence from inanimate pieces of wood (I swear the things were out to get me!), we opened up the wondrous bench to find.....

The only thing in it is the supports that make it up

Nothing but cobwebs and disappointment. The useless bench is really useless! Someone went out of their way to create this horrible little thing. It is really too high to comfortably sit on and way too low to set stuff on.

Just look how awkward that positioning is

Due to this amazing and totally unexpected discovery (note the dripping sarcasm leaking from your computer screen...), there is some debate on what to do next. Danielle is of the opinion we should turn the useless bench into a much more useful storage and seating apparatus. Matt thinks that the bench would be too small and out of the way to serve any useful purpose and should be demolished in favor of expanding the doorway from the kitchen back to its original 5' from the current 2.5' to open up the house more.

Luckily we have plenty of time to figure this out as the useless bench is a minor (but somehow uniquely irritating) annoyance. Hopefully, Matt can put the wood covering back on so the bench is merely useless again and not a spiky forest of doom looking for a careless rear end.

Dumb Ideas and Dampness don't mix

Coming into the house, we knew we had a little bit of a mold problem in the basement. The inspector had pointed out some "microbial evidence" on one wall. The thought was we would pull off a small amount of paneling, clean the wood studs behind it, and clean the backside of the other side of the wall. Easy right?

So we picked up the right gear to clean up the mold. A little bleach, a nice high filter mask, and some new, heavy duty gloves. See how wonderfully photogenic they make Matt....

This is why we don't take selfies

Now that we were geared up properly, we went in and took off some paneling. Imagine our surprise when we found, dun, dun, dun......DRYWALL!!!!!!! Some yahoo had put up a nice drywall installation and COVERED IT WITH HORRIBLE AWFUL PANELING!!!!! WHY?!?!?!?!

The good news was that after finding the drywall, the cause of the mold was quite clear. The inspector had thought that the metal floor joists were creating condensate and dripping between the walls. Nope. What was happening was that the drywall and paneling were trapping moisture and creating a perfect environment for mold between the two walls. The worse news (way past the bad news) is that the mold was much worse than we thought it was. Just look at these pictures of the drywall behind the paneling....

Luckily this was the worst it got

But boy was it everywhere, and on walls we weren't expecting it on

In the end we took out the bottom half of four walls, both paneling and drywall. In addition, many of the paneling pieces on the foundation walls, which were just glued to some 2" XPS foam insulation, had some water damage or dampness on them so we removed the bottoms of them as well. Luckily, we got pictures of the carnage and the aftermath for you all to enjoy.

Deconstruction is therapeutic!

99 pieces of gunk from the wall, 99 pieces of gunk....

We just pulled off the lower half to make less trash and take less time

Hammers make poor straight cutters..

Finally all cleaned up. I think we had 5 full bags of debris.

In the long run, this doesn't have a whole lot of effect on our plans. We were planning on redoing the basement anyways, and the way most of it is currently put together is a bit too slipshod for our liking. Unfortunately, in the short run, it means Matt is out of his nice, cozy basement office and has to relocate upstairs until it can be fixed. He is quite vexed at this, especially since he probably will be waiting 'til sometime next year for anything to get done.

Onward to ADVENCHA!!!!!!!

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! This is the start of our little blog. This will serve a triple purpose and maximize that all important factor of EFFICIENCY!!!! First off, it allows us to let friends and family know a little more about our life so far away from so many. We know we can be horrible about keeping in touch. (It's so hard,......and we're forgetful :p) Second, it lets us keep a near permanent record of the things we do to our new home. There's probably going to be a lot of them. Third, and personally most important, it lets us vent and/or gush about different things in our house. I say most important because keeping Danielle from killing Matt because he has talked her ear off one too many times is a very, very important goal.

To start, a couple notes. First, this is mainly a house remodeling blog. Yes, there will be things that are not house related on here from time to time, and often what is happening with the house will bleed over into other life things, but the house is our first and foremost topic on this blog.

Next, this blog is mainly for one-way communication. We make no promise on checking comments or regular updates or anything that would restrict a naptime. Deal. If you want to talk more about what is on here or want to just catch up, send an e-mail to one of us and hope it doesn't get lost in the black hole of our g-mail inboxes. Or if you are feeling exceptionally lucky, try calling Matt and hope the planets align so Matt actually has his phone on him, it is charged, not in a dead spot, and he is feeling slightly less lazy than normal so he will actually pick up the phone. Or, ya know, smoke signals might work.

Third, Matt is the one writing the majority of the posts. Danielle is a literal Godsend and can check grammar, punctuation and the like, but keep in mind Matt almost had to retake remedial English because he was too stubborn to use "proper" (Pbthhhh) grammar and one woman can only do so much. On that note there will be no comments about grammar, spelling, tense, or any other highfalutin concepts, or I shall bring out the BanHammer and bop you back into the interwebs.

Finally, we both hope you enjoy this blog and it helps us to keep connected to our small but great network of friends and family.

God Bless,

Matt and Danielle!