time for (the rest of the) plumbing.

My arch nemesis... this cast iron behemoth -

My ultimate weapon of choice... my trusty sawzall, armed with a Diablo diamond grit cast iron cutting blade -

Ok, so by 'ultimate' I mean it wasn't my first. Mainly because I couldn't initially imagine how I'd cut the 2" vent stack on the right in that top photo without blowing through the finished wall of our bedroom on the other side. I got lucky with the first cut on the 1-1/2" drain, where I had just used leftover metal cutting blades I had lying around. Not wise. That took a while, and a bit of muscle. But they were short, so it was easier to not cut through the wall.

So for the larger vent stack, I went a different route: I rented a pipe cutter like this bad boy for $24. It seemed that would do the trick, without any chance of blasting through the wall directly behind the pipe. But... it failed, mainly because the chain links were too big, so even opened as far as it would go and the closest link we could attached, when we levered the beast all the way shut it only begun to dig its teeth into the iron.

Bummer.

So I broke out the sawzall, and got creative. It was the angle and length of the blade I was up against, and the fact the vent stack was about an inch from the sheetrock behind it. But I realized... if I notched the framing stud and cut with the sawzall through the notch, I could keep the angle more parallel to the sheetrock - thereby, (hopefully) not cutting into it.

I gave it a shot... and, well, it worked!

That's the cast iron with the new 2" ABS attached by a Fernco flexible coupler, and the notch in the stud is where I stuck the sawzall through to cut the cast iron pipe. It still took some muscle, and I kept spraying the pipe with water to cool it down as I cut. But about fifteen minutes or so on each of the two cuts and I could take that section of cast iron and chuck it out the front door (I actually did this, onto the driveway... it was good times).

It was then a matter of cutting and glueing all the new ABS to make the new drain where I needed it.

Well, seems simple enough. But it required doing it one piece at a time, dry-fitting, measuring, cutting. Repeat. A lot. The line jutting over from the old drain to where I needed the new drain had to slope at least the standard 1/4" per linear foot, but I just took a level to it and when it wasn't level I called it good. Strapped the section above the 90º junction to the 2x4 brace and kept going.

Oh, and redo that stupid mistake I made where I used red PEX for the cold and, well, blue for the hot.

That was a dumb, dumb idea because after I cut, refitted new PEX with the right color-coding, and turned on the water it, well... leaked. One of the push-on fittings seemed to be the culprit. And it was 11 o'clock at night, so I couldn't do anything about it until morning. So that dripped all night, and bright and early the next day I ran to the store to get a fitting to find out, well... it wasn't the fitting. It was the little 3" piece of PEX pipe. So I cut a new piece, fitted it, turned back on the water and... no leaks!

Finally... the moment of truth, where I had to move the vanity into place, connect the hot and cold supplies and the drain, and find out what all leaked. Good times. My heart was racing. I fitted everything -

and turned on the faucets, then watched as the water drained... no leaks!

(The painter's tape is so we don't mar the edges moving it in and out of the bathroom)

Lastly, an experiment... To change the condenser tubing for the furnace from running out the back of the house where it had been installed to drain with the house plumbing. So I ran a length of 1-1/2" ABS off the drain up into the attic -

In the attic, I pulled the tubing from the back of the house over to this new drain stack and fitted it into the plumbing. Only time will tell if this will drain properly (it's warmer out now so the furnace isn't kicking in and the condenser isn't running as often ). If it doesn't work, I'll just seal off this extra stack and screw the tubing into the outlet at the back of the house. If it does, it'll mean we don't have to worry about it freezing every winter when it gets below 32ºF.

But regardless... the plumbing is finished! Next... clear out the bathroom to install the heated flooring element and then tile the floor before (at last) putting up walls and starting to make this space feel more like an actual room...

time for electrical.

Ok, so we now have lights and a fan and heated flooring and outlets in the bathroom...

But backing up a bit, I first had to figure out the wiring scheme for the lights, which I was running off a single circuit devoted to all the overhead lights in the house. Oh, and since this bathroom is a jack and jill bathroom with two doors, I needed to throw in a 3-way switch into the circuit.

I started the original circuit when I had to wire a front porch light after painting the house, which looked like this -

But yeah, throw in a 3-way switch. I drew out a diagram, scratched it out, drew out another, scratched it out, drew out a third, and that's when I felt like I had gotten it right...

The hot coming into the box was tied off with the hot in the 14/3 cable to the 3-way switch and the hot going out of the box to the shower light a few feet to the right. The neutrals were tied from the cable coming in and going out, and the cable going to the first fixture (yeah, there are three fixtures on this switch), while the neutral in the 14/3 cable was coded 'hot' and ran - along with the traveler cable - to each of the two switches.

Yeah, it looked right. But I wouldn't know until I wired it all together. So I spent a couple hours in the attic drilling holes through the joists, running cable, and pulling it through the top plate of the wall framing. Then I tied everything together the way I had drawn it a third time -

Then flipped the breaker back on in the basement, and at last one of the 3-way switches... nothing. Oh well. I figured I'd look at my diagram again and try to - wait! The fixture (being a 1920s replica) had a switch on it, too! So I flicked that and... boom! Light!

It worked! It actually worked.

So the hard part done, the rest of the work I needed to do was cleaning up the mess of old wiring so I could splice in the fan (since I opted for a fancy fan control with a humidity sensor, it needed a constant power source - a neutral - so I couldn't wire it like a light fixture in that first circuit), wire the light above the shower on another switch, and take the spare circuit we wired when we ran cables for the whirlpool tub to wire a GFCI outlet - and second outlet on the load side - and splice from the line side to branch off to power the heated flooring element.

Not tough. A little complicated, but not tough.

Much cleaner than before, with just a single junction box that will be hidden in the wall to splice in the cable for the fan -

The box on the right side of where the vanity will be, with the GFCI box, fan switch, and dimmer for the light over the shower -

The boxes on the left side of the vanity: the 3-way dimmer and outlet that is wired on the load side of the GFCI, and the box where the programmable control (which I found new on Ebay for almost half of what Home Depot was charging) for the flooring element will go -

The whole mess, more or less -

And the pile of old electrical crap that I removed (yay!) -

Seriously, a couple of those boxes looked like the wiring versions of a rat's nest.

And the fixtures, which - now that they're installed - mean I don't have to use my work light anymore -

And the shower light -

Phwew. Now I just have to finish up the plumbing (cutting the 2" cast iron vent stack and installing a bunch of ABS drain and vent pipes, as well as a quick fix on the supplies for the sink and toilet) before I can (yay!) start hanging the walls, installing the heated floor element (I know I linked to Home Depot, but seriously - Ebay has this stuff significantly cheaper!), and tiling the floor...

time for plumbing.

I hate plumbing.

There, I said it. But it's sort of necessary (and evil, as the saying goes), and so it had to be done. Starting with a good ol' fashioned Cutting Into Our House's Plumbing party. In this case, it was copper supply lines running to the old tub shower. It's good times having water spraying all over, even after having shutoff the main and bled all the faucets in the house (note to self: the faucets outside the house are below even these supply lines in the basement ceiling, so need to be bled, too).

Anyway, these are the new PEX (Sharkbite) 1/2" shutoff valves I installed, and the PEX running up into the new tub/shower cavity. Next up... the valve. Similar to how I did it in the other bathroom, I zipped a 1x6 in half on the table saw after drilling a 2-1/2" hole, threaded the four 1/2" Sharkbite connectors, then clamped it down tight -

K joked when I was threading them about how, with all our fancy advancements, plumbing still requires wrapping threaded pipe ends with teflon tape. I pointed out, however, that this Sharkbite stuff really is a leap forward. Seriously. It's the only thing that makes plumbing bearable.

It wasn't too tough to get the tub and shower stub out installed -

The only tricky part was being pretty exact for the tub because the tub faucet threads onto the 1/2" nipple - and it needs to A) thread as tight as possible so it doesn't leak while B) butting perfectly up against the finished tile. Kohler said to measure 4-1/8" from the end of the nipple to where the finished wall will be. Of course, there is no finished wall - so I had to guesstimate using a scrap of 1x to mimic the 3/4" thickness (1/2" cement board + 1/4" tile). Crossing fingers after the wallboard and tile are installed the faucet fits right because, well, at that point it'll have to fit right.

That said, the shower and valve (once the work of clamping it to the 1x6 was done) were easy. I also glued the PVC drain fitting to the ABS P-trap with a special, slimy, green glue concoction. And yes, I made a special trip to Lowe's and spent $6 to get it - I don't mess with plumbing fittings, and assume that if it's recommended to use this glue for that and that glue for this... I'll do it.

Then the fun part - testing the tub!

So I cleaned it out, installed the overflow drain cover and drain plug -

Then filled 'er up!

Once it was full... turned on the jets! And... nothing. Drat. Went down to the breaker box thinking I may have switched off the breaker. Nope, it was on. Back up to check the outlet. Doh - it was dead. I dunno how the GFCI tripped, but it did. Hopefully that doesn't happen too often, although I'll be installing an access panel in the wall at that end of the tub in order to get at it in case it does. But still, hopefully it doesn't...

Anyway - flipped the GFCI back on and presto... jets!

Oh man. That was the sound of luxury, I'm not gonna lie...

Too bad K discovered a leak in the drain fitting under the tub (we can look up at it to access through the basement ceiling, which is convenient - and will be to fix it). So I'll have to take apart the drain and rethread it all to reseat the rubber seal. Bleh.

But the fun wasn't over... it was time to once again throw a House Plumbing Cutting party, and disassemble the galvanized supplies for the new vanity. Yep, it was wet and messy again - but we got the new PEX supplies fitted and ready to go -

Oops. Despite literally writing on the back of the drywall 'H' and 'C' for 'Hot' and 'Cold'... I still installed blue PEX (indicating cold) on the hot supply, and red on the cold. I'm retarded. It doesn't really matter, but I'll probably fix it cos it'll bug me. Which means shutting off the water and bleeding the lines again - oh well.

What remains then - besides those couple of fixes - is hacking off that cast iron drain pipe running to the vent on the right. I'll cut it off with a sawzall just above the floor joist, slip on a no-hub coupler and run ABS to line up with where the new drain will need to be, and attach it to the existing drain stack (which I'll also need to cut off, and likely run ABS up through the roof flashing - hopefully I'll be able to just stick a new ABS pipe through it without having to mess with it).

It'll look something like this -

And when all said and done... this (the sketch on the lefthand page) -

Onward...

we have a tub!

After making the classic mistake of ordering (and framing in) the wrong tub, we received the correct one a week ago or so. This is the most important part of the bathroom remodel, so it was time to fix my mistake and get it installed.

I needed to make up 4" in the space we framed for the tub, so between Home Depot and Lowe's, I was able to get what I needed: a stack of 2x2s (1-1/2") and 2x3s (2-1/2"). Today, Scott and I 'scabbed' them onto the framing we installed back in August - 2x3s on the plumbing side...

And 2x2s on the built-in cabinet/shelf side...

Then we dry-fit the tub to make sure it was good -

Boom. It fit. Time to install the drain -

Had to dry-fit the PVC pipe to measure, then cut it to length. Overflow and drain installed to the tub. Now time to take a look at the drain under the subfloor...

I thought I'd actually be able to use the glued section of the P-trap left from the old tub, and just take off the slip joint for the trap and use the new one I had bought. The thing is, apparently in 1980-whenever that slip joint was roughly 1/16" smaller, so... the new one didn't fit. I ended up having to cut off the ABS (slowly, it was a little tight with the saw under the floor between the joists... ) and glue a coupler to the existing pipe, then a short section to line up the trap where the drain would be from the tub. To make it a little easier, I opted to saw an 11" square hole in the basement ceiling (still, why did anyone install sheetrock on the basement ceiling!) to access the drain and make sure it all fit (I'd cover it up with an access panel) -

But it did... all fit, that is. Phwew. Knowing it did, we heaved it back out, then I went to work mixing up the mortar. We first laid 2-mil sheeting on the subfloor, then dumped the mortar onto it and spread it around -

Finally, we lifted the tub into place for (hopefully) the last time (then proceeded to jump up and down inside it to make sure it fit). We had scribed pencil lines on the joists for where the tub flange was before setting it in the mortar, so we'd know where it needed to rest. It all looked good, and was level -

Kohler's instructions were, in typical fashion, really lame. Here, Scott tries to make sense of them...

They mentioned how the motor should rest directly on the subfloor but, uhh, that wasn't actually possible (that plywood it's sitting on is part of the tub base) -

So hopefully that's ok and it isn't going to be terribly noisy. We'll test it before hanging the cement board and sheetrock...

Lastly, we nailed up 1/4" furring strips I had gotten at Lowes -

Only to find out 1/4" (despite that being what the ol' instructions called for) weren't thick enough - the tub flange was thicker than apparently it should have been. So I looked up in the garage and found two full sheets of 1/2" (well, technically 7/16") plywood, then broke out the table saw so we could rip 1-1/2"-wide strips to use for furring. I'll return the cedar ones to Lowe's (they were kind of expensive). Better to be scrappy, afterall - they're just strips of wood that will never be seen.

After we ate homemade pizza for dinner (that's the price we paid for Scott's help heh) and he left, I took a circular saw to the original framing to make room for the built-in cabinet that I'll build this coming week, as well as installed the framing for the built-in shower shelves. I mis-measured one of them (12-1/2" instead of 12-3/4", even though I had clearly written the latter) and mis-cut one of the 2x4s. I thought I was super-clever by using the back of the old vanity for the back of one of the shelves, but I mis-cut it as well and had to redo it.

It was time to be done.

A successful day overall - the framing fixed for the tub, the (correct) tub installed (just need to get the ABS-PVC glue to finish the final fitting), the framing fixed for the built-in cabinet, and the shower stall shelves built. But for some reason it still doesn't feel productive...

Christmas lights.

I guess it was fortuitous to wait to hang the Christmas lights, because the night we got around to hanging them it snowed!

It took a quick trip to the store to get gutter clips (haven't had gutters in a long time!), and K and Cheyenne kept us company on the porch...