Long Weekend = Lots of Work

This weekend Dan Allen camped out with us at the Chesterfield house. It was Dan's birthday this weekend and he decided to spend it working on our house. He is clearly a nicer man than I.
Let me start with that we are a bunch of Jack legs. I'm not really sure what that means means but I live in the south so I suppose I should using sayings that don't make sense at all. Maybe later on I can work something in that I can "shake a stick at".
In reality we did a fairly good job and everything we have done so far works well and is not a hazard in any way.
We started out this weekend with the goal of plumbing.  We wanted to get water to everywhere it needed to go upstairs and get the drains plumbed downstairs to the basement.

Below is the basement where we should have started.  We didn't.... but we should have.  We used 3/4 inch PEX piping to get the cold and hot water feed lines to upstairs. We put 1/4 turn valves in the basement so we can shut off the water to upstairs when we feel like it for future plumbing. PEX is awesome, anyone can do it. Putting clamping rings on plastic tube is soooo much better then trying to sweat copper pipes with solder.
We cut into the 4 inch cast iron drain line that goes to the street with a saw zaw and reduced the line that runs upstairs to a 3 inch line.

Cast iron is tough, however if you are going to cut it, we have only found one decent way. Milwaukee makes a blade called "The Torch" The blade was about shot from cutting through the 4 inch pipe twice, but that's all we needed it to do. This is an example blade not that one we used. ours was longer and costs about $17 at home depot. I was also very disappointed when my $9.99 saw zaw started smoking.  That harbor freight tool has actually been with my for quite a while.  Dan's real saw saw finished the job.

The floor cut away for the new plumbing.

The toilet plumbing

Shower plumbing

Sink plumbing

Vent pipe,
For those of you who do not know, the drain system in your house in vented to the roof. When you flush the toilet a rush of water is sent down the drain. It needs to be able to pull air from somewhere so the water can fall.  It's kind of like drinking from a plastic water bottle with your mouth all the way around the bottle top. (I know you have all tried it) The bottle starts to collapse because you have taken out water but have not allowed the water in the bottle to be replaced with air. Venting is a very important part of plumbing that can not be over looked.

The lighting is now functional and on switches and new wiring.

We were able to throw away all of the old electrical from upstairs... I don't miss you old wiring. Who ever thought it was a good idea to run electrical wires with cloth insulation through a metal jacket is a moron. Better yet after that they decided to terminate the wires in a metal box. I guess plastic wasn't invented back then?

The floor in the bathroom has been put back together. That was finished at nearly 11pm last night. Rock board and tile will cover all that is there at some point.

I also said I was post and update on the grass which is not great but doing better then it was. Yes, I know I need an edger. It's not perfect but compared to before there is more grass then you can shake a stick at < there it is!

I also wanted to give credit to my pregnant wife. Although she is not as active in the house construction now, she does keep us fed and do small jobs without complaining when she is asked. She has made sure that when we are done working that we have clean towels, clothing, and sheets to sleep on. We often times give her crap for doing nothing, but that's just to keep her on her toes. If we didn't give her any crap, who would?

Project Second Floor

I am on a roll today, might as well keep going and get caught up.
We started on the second floor a while back and this is now something that I need to get done as Baby H's entry to this construction sight is nearing. I figured I would start with the tour of the second floor, this is the last time you will see it like this as it no longer exists.

 There is actually a dormer behind the wall in the picture below. You will see it later.

 Cacky takes the first swing! Cooper assists.

 In between this photo above and the photo below Mark and Derrick were brought it assist in demolition

If you don't have a Dan Allen, you should probably get one. They are usually located in to the tool isle at Home Depot.

One full dumpster. 

Cacky gets her new mom mobile, might as well break it in at the Hope Depot.

Time to start raising the ceiling to a true 8ft.

Hey, there's that dormer, why were you covered?

Even the studs that were there needed to be taken out and replaced as nothing was square. You can't have anything that's not square if Dan Allen is involved. One day hopefully in a very long time when Dan is no longer with us I will make sure he is laid to rest with a 6ft level next to him.

 The framing is mostly done, the roof beams have been leveled. The lighting has been mounted and electrical is about 50% done.
These last 2 pictures were taken this morning so there is where things actually sit. I am actually looking forward to insulation and sheet rock! The may be because I am considering spray foam which someone else would have to do.

Since the last post was the driveway I see it only fitting that moved on to the new ruined lawn.
I came up with an amazing plan to not have any of the dirt hauled off that was removed from where the driveway is now. Since our back yard was in terrible shape anyway I thought we could just spread all of the dirt over the yard and start again.  This was a terrible idea. North Carolina doesn't have dirt, they have clay and apparently about a billion small rocks per square yard.
Cacky and I decided that we would split this project up and start with the front yard.
Which at the time looked like this.

We had to remove a bunch of this clay as there was just too much there as well as all of the clumps of dirt, grass and rock.
I showed this picture to the head grounds keeper at the stadium who gave me some good advice. He said it's the wrong time of year to plant grass so put as little money into this as possible knowing that you are going to have to redo some of it after the summer.
He suggested I get some top soil (as cheap as possible) with some tall fescue gass seed and a fertilizer with the highest middle number as possible. He said brad doesn't matter.
We took his advice and headed off to our vacation home otherwise known as Home Depot.
We ended up using about 50 40lb bags of top soil for this part of the front yard.  Those bags sure don't go very far.

A few week later we were this far.

It is doing much better then this now. I will have to take another picture to show were it is now.
It's far from perfect as there is some clover in there and bermuda is trying to take it over, but I have decided that as long as it's green I am ok with it.  If there is bermuda in your neighbors yards and you don't like it you either need to make lawn care your new hobby or hire someone to take care of your lawn on a regular basis. I have chosen plan C, ignore it, it's green and eliminated the clay pit that was once there.

The back yard we just haven't had enough time to put into.  I did my best to level it out by hand and we decided at that point to break up the ground a bit and drive to just throw down some seed and fertilizer.
If green stuff grows we will be excited. Cooper will also be excited as he is tired of being covered in orange clay every time it rains.
This is how the back yard was left, I will get some updated photos is any grass grows.
Note, there also were 2 big trees back here that were taken out somewhere along the line.

This has not been updated in a long time. I still blame Cacky for that.  

I figured we would start with the driveway. We clearly needed a driveway, we practically park on our lawn.

 

The driveway have been a nightmare.  I found some people on craigslist that claimed to have equipment issues and kept delaying.  Finally I went home for lunch and the people were at my house working on the driveway. It was a redneck family, a Dad, a wife and their daughter that were trying to dig out the diveway by hand.

When I first say this I asked a few questions and figured they knew what they were talking about. 

When I arrived home after work I was very concerned. They had done a day of work, concrete was to be poured the next day and they weren't even half way done digging.  I decided to go out and take some measurements to see what kind of job they had done. 

The agreement was for a 4 inch thick 3500psi concrete driveway.

Below are some of the pictures from my measurements.

Well, that didn't go well at all. I wrote and email expressing my concerns. 

The rednecks did not like this at all and sent back degrading angry comments and then quit.

This was a great thing, now I could hire someone who knows what they are doing.

I was able to find a new company the next morning who planned on pouring concrete by lunch time. I took a video of how this driveway digging process is supposed to look. It took this guy about 5 seconds to dig out about 20% of the driveway.

Just before the new crew came in I decided to install new posts for the gates that would eventually go in.

For the record there is no way 3 red necks could have done this job, the new crew was about 6 people are the worked their behinds off to get the job done.

We are very happy with the end result, but what a mess was left of the lawn after this project.... More info on that in the next entry.

If you leave this page with one bit of information it should be, don't let red necks try to dig your driveway by hand.