Back, tanned, and glad to be back!

Back from Florida.  Four days in Ft. Lauderdale.  By the beach to be precise.  The weather was great with the temps in the low 80's and a really nice prevailing breeze to keep things stirred up.

The main drag separating hotel and shops
from the beach

This was my welcome back to Dallas....cold and overcast.

Cold and dreary day in Dallas
(The Calatrava Bridge, not far from my house)

The hotel...
There were quite a few small hotels in the surrounding neighborhood undergoing renovations.  The one I stayed at clearly had gone through a recent and very well done renovation. 

Completely private
The beach straight ahead two blocks

It was clean and welcoming.  The staff and guests very friendly.  It boasted two private courtyard areas, one with a really nice pool, the other with a tall fountain, a massage table tucked in one corner and jacuzzi tucked in the other.  A substantial Contintental breakfast was laid out every morning and it was a convenient two short blocks from the beach....that is if you were of the mind not to utilize the pool area.  This hotel you could stay in all week and not miss anything elsewhere if you felt like it.

The renovations the hotel undertook were done well and were what I call "trendy"!  Over all, very nice indeed!

Well, except.....

By "trendy", I mean literally in 10-20 years you'll know just by looking at the amenities that the renovations took place back in 2010.  Dark tiles (which I like), trendy glass bowl sink with brushed aluminum stalk fixture, dark slate like tiles on the shower stall floor and wall surrounds with dark bronze fixtures.  All very trendy, all very 2010-11ish, and all currently on display in your local big box home improvement store.

Don't get me wrong, it was done very well!!  It's just that...., to me...., it's already dated.  Food for thought!

More, with pics, in my next posting.

Odds and ends, then gone!

Finished out the minor details on the hallway ceilings and did some other odds and ends around the house.   Spent the afternoon burning through another pile of debris down in the dry channel.

I have a commitment in Dallas later this evening and again on Sunday and then leave for a week in Florida week so no new postings till next weekend.

Waco Trip

Made it to Waco on Sunday though I had a bit of excitement on the way.  The right rear tire experienced a tread separation. 

Just about the time I noticed my laptop on the seat next to me starting to vibrate and immediately after I had the thought that I really shouldn't delay any further replacing all four aging tires on the truck, the tread gave way with a terrible slapping noise and a burst of brown dust out the back.  Pretty exciting but probably more so for the guy behind me.

I swapped out the spare and continued on to the Waco house, mowed the grass, visited with the dairy farmer neighbor next door for a couple of hours and then on to Dallas so I could be at the office on Monday for a day visit.  While there it was off with the old tires and on with the new!

I made it back to the Lake House Monday evening with the tractor and trailer in tow without any further problems.

Burn Ban Lifted

Living in a populated city you have "bulk trash" day.  The city comes around with several trucks and an a pincer scoop and takes it all away, sometimes leaving big gouges out of your curbside grass strip.

In more rural settings, you burn your bulk trash....when there is not a burn ban in place.  We've been in drought conditions for the past six plus months so the county was a bit slow to lift the burn ban.  I had cleaned up the lots on either side of the house and had several piles of debris (including construction related) that were waiting for the day the burn ban was lifted.

The lot to the right of the house
(taken early in the year)

Two lots on the far side of the trailer.

Construction debris that eventually, where appropriate,
will be burned...

That day finally arrived!  Ya never know the ban will go back into place so late in the afternoon on Saturday, I stopped work on the hallway ceilings to take advantage of the lifted ban and the remaining daylight.

Two debris piles down, three or four to go.  I'm holding off on the construction debris until the house is done and I'm sure I'll no longer will have a use for any of it.  When that time comes it will all go up in smoke!

No work on Sunday as I have to make a trip over to the Waco property first thing in the morning to check on the house and to mow and then on to Dallas the same afternoon.  I plan on bringing the tractor with mower back with me and keep it here from now on.  I'll transport it to Waco whenever I need to mow there.

Hallway Framing...the other side

Friday night I started on framing out the ceiling on the bedroom side of the hallway.  It's a bit more complicated in that the AC intake vent is placed on that side.

When the AC was installed I was advised that the logical place to install the return was the furthest point away from sources of heat, namely the kitchen.  That meant the place to intall was in the hallway above the guest bedrooms.  Based upon my original plan to keep the ceilings as high as possible, I had them install it as high as possible on that side.  Turns out, with the later decision to limit hall the ceilings to the standard 8', it was only 4" higher than the new8' mark.  Rather than take it all down and reposition, I decided to leave it where it was and frame in around it.

Overall it was pretty easy to frame in around it.  The challenge came in the figuring out the different angle cuts of the cross pieces so they would come together in some sense of order.

If it were a rectangular space, it probably would have taken me all of an hour to frame it in but give the different angles, it took me all day.  Of course half that time was spent visually analyzing (maybe over analyzing) what and how it needed to be.  The biggest time consumer was figuring the different angles and how to go about cutting them.  Seems some of them were too much for my chop saw so I had to resort to a hand saw and then my reciprocating saw.

I also had to figure out how I was going to enable access to the cupola above.  As mentioned in the last post, one of the factors in keeping the ceiling at 8' was to allow a means of accessing the left side of the cupola.  Where the right side was problematic to but a little easier to resolve.  The easiest means of access was going to be through the ceiling of the closet.

It was fairly easy to remove the cross pieces and reframe the opening to allow access.  That in turn allowed me to enclose the side wall below the intake vent that originally had been thought to being the only source of access.

Like I said, by far the biggest challenge in this area was figuring all the different angles to cut.  In the pic below, there were 4 different angles coming together to form the corner supports.

I got as far as framing in the perimeter frame work.  All that remains now are the cross pieces.  I could have probably finished it in the same day but with the recent time change it started to get dark and I had planned some outside work that I needed at least get started before it got dark (next post).  I figured I could start that and come back to finish the out shortly.

Hallway framing

Now that all of the electrical rework has been completed, the AC/Furnace, ducts, hot water heater, and plumbing lines all installed and working, it's time to move on to framing in the two hallway ceilings on either side of the fireplace.

If you'll recall, the entry hall, laundry area and the two hallways on either side of the fireplace were only 6'3" high.  They were dark, uninviting and claustrophobic spaces.   

Reminds me of a cave

There's that ugly purple again

The dead air space above the halls served no useful purpose and could be better utilized if opened up giving a sense of greater space or in some way re-purposed.  The same held true for the air space above two bathrooms. 

So, with the exception of ceiling above the laundry area which became the AC systems deck, I opted to raise all of the other ceilings to their maximum height.  In the case of the bathrooms and the entry hall, that meant raising them all they way to the underside of the roof deck.  I installed two skylights as well, one in the guest bath, the other in the entry hall. 

The two side hallway ceilings, unfortunately, could not be raised that high as there still had to be room for the AC ducts.  Try as I might to raise them to the maximum available height, I finally had to concede that they were going to be limited to the standard 8' height for a couple of reasons;  it would have unnecessarily cramped the duct work and it would have completely cut off access to the cupola, the latter reason being the most significant. 

The bathroom side hallway

Insuring it's level

I'll place plywood decking on the top side of the ceiling joists over both hallways which will enable a means to skirt around the AC system and access the cupola and could also be used for storage of smaller items.

The bedroom side hallway is next and is a bit more complicated as the AC intake duct is located there.

More later.

Guest Bath

I spent Friday evening browsing Lowes (my third home) for a bathtub and looking at shower surround material.

For the tub, I decided on an American Standard Princeton Premium Bathtub.  It's light weight steel and porcelain but also insulated by a 1/4" layer of molded platstic....or some such stuff.  A true cast iron tub would have been too impractical in terms of cost and my ability to manhandle it into place.  This tub was only about 100lbs and pretty manageable.

As far as the surround, I'm torn between just doing a prefabricated shower surround in lieu of the more time consuming but impressive backer board/ceramic tile combination.  I still haven't made up my mind but given it's the guest bath and thus not subject to high usage and related wear and tear, I'm leaning towards the simplicity of the prefabricated variety.  Still looking into that.

I picked the tub up on Saturday and set about installing it.

Installation, in theory, is pretty easy.....
The tub itself just sits on the floor with, according to the instructions, a couple of nail heads over the outside lip to hold it in place. 

On the other hand.....
The drain setup, while simple in theory, was proving to be a pain in the butt! 

The first kit was all brass and had all the right parts however, after messing with it for over an hour I finally figured out that the tub, being insulated, was too thick for the brass drain fitting that goes through the floor of the tub.  I could not get it to mate up with the corresponding fitting under the tub.

Grrrr.... I returned the brass kit to Lowes and bought the $30 cheaper plastic kit which mated up like a charm.  Since I still had a previous brass pipe connector on hand from the old tub, I used that part as it mated up quite well with the copper drain pipes in the ground.

With the tub in place, I was able to accurately measure for the height of the shower head and get that component installed.  That last little bit formally completes all of the plumbing that needed to be in place before the sheetrock could go up.

Will have to make a decision on the surround before the sheetrock can happen.

Decisions, decisions!

Plumbing work...Complete!

The remaining PEX lines continuing past the water heater installed pretty quick.  

The plumbing setup in this house is pretty simplistic.  From the water heater the PEX lines were routed across the hallway, over the soffit area above the future kitchen counter and down the wall beside the kitchen drain pipe.  From there each line T'd to provide fittings for the kitchen sink and lines into and across the connecting common bathroom wall.

 Once the the lines were run I set about installing the two shower/bath valves with the necessary GatorBITE components. 

Working with GatorBITE fittings proved to be so easy I started to think maybe this was going just a bit TOO easy to be true.  I had visions of witnessing 15 different geyers of water when I got around to turning the water on. 

Never the less, with tongue in cheek, I plowed on.

The end of the line with caps and pipe to spare.

Since I want the shower fittings to be several inches higher than where they are traditionally installed, I purposely left those and the tub spot placement for last.  Once the tub and shower pan are installed, I'll measure and install them at the desired height.

Filling the system....

It's time!  I double checked all the fittings and insured the newly installed cut off valve in the water heater closet was closed.  With bated breath, I went out to the outside shutoff valve and partially opened at a very low flow.....then RAN back inside to be sure I didn't spring a leak at the first connector!

So far so good.  No leak!  I opened the internal shutoff valve installed by the water heater to start the flow into the rest of the system.

Being overly cautious, I purposely kept the water flow slow.  So slow in fact, it took over an hour for the 38gallon water heater to fill up (I said I was being overly cautious!).  To let off airpressure, I opened the shower valve in the bathroom which immediately started gurgling and sputtering. 

After the first hour I was starting to get a little concerned because the toilet tank wasn't filling up but a few minutes later the water heater tank belched out it's last bit of air into the lines and the cold water line gained sufficient pressure to start filling the toilet tank. 

Still, I kept checking the lines.  Dry, and dry, and dry....  WOW!

We officially have water....again!!

It's sure nice to have water in the house again.....and NO LEAKS!! 

Double WOW!

Plumbing work

As mentioned in an earlier post, I opted to replace all of the existing water lines with PEX.  On Saturday afternoon I mapped out the water lines and inventoried all of the existing connections.  The same evening I headed off to Lowes to pick up the flex-pipe and applicable Gator Bite fittings.

Quite an assortment...and a hefty price tag!

Naturally, after having collected the initial round of components, I realized I still did not have everything so it was back to Lowes on Sunday....some three more times!  Jeesh!

Finally, later Sunday, when I was sure I had everything (riiiiight....) and got everything in place, I turned off the water,  drained the lines, took yet another deep breath, lit up the torch and set about removing the first section of pipe.  There were a couple of places where I had to use the copper pipe cutter.  Overall it went well leaving me with a nice pile of copper pipes.....and no water.

The last piece to tackle was the water supply line that comes up through the floor.  

 The question is, which one is the source of water?  Once the joints were removed, I went out and turned the water on just long enough to see which pipe filled up.  The one on the right!

The Boss inspecting before work could begin

 With the Boss's approval, it got to be the ceremonial first to be fitted with a Gator Bite coupler fitting.

From there it was just a matter of slipping the white PEX tubing into the various fittings.  It's really very easy....so easy you start wondering if it wasn't going just a bit too easy!  Oh well, forge on!!

I could have gone with the colored PEX tubing, Blue for cold, Red for hot, but I worried I might come up short somewhere and would have to improvise sticking a blue where red should be or vice versa so I opted to go with just plain White.  Since the walls are all open, it will be easy to mark them later.  Right now I'm just using blue tape for cold and nada for hot.

When I got to the water heater I remembered I had some followup work to complete up in the cupola directly above that space, namely connecting the bathroom exhaust vent lines to the exterior exhaust port so I had to stop long enough to get that work completed.

What a pain that was having to work around the new AC ducts.  But, I got it done and out of the way and the other work was allowed to continue.

As always, the Boss looks on.....and passes judgement.

More on the next post!

I have returned!

It's good to be Home!

I spent all of last week in Seattle in a training class for the new job.  It was good to be back in Seattle however brief.  I used to live in Seattle from '83-'96.  It was a beautiful part of the country to be in and remains so today. 

While I enjoyed living there, surprisingly over the years, I found that I have not missed being there.  I had a great time this trip revisiting many of my old haunts and meeting up with coworkers from some 20-30yrs ago.       

My first DIY project...

Top left unit up in the trees

My very first DIY "home improvement" project took place in my top floor condo on 15th Avenue.  I replaced the parquet floor in the entry hall and the bathroom floor with ceramic tile.  It came out pretty nice.  I wish I had stayed long enough to redo the kitchen and fireplace and to install crown moulding but not too long after I bought the place I transferred to Kansas City and then on to Dallas.  I rented it out before eventually selling it.

And now it's back to the Round House....