Spring is finally here

It was a beautiful day outside yesterday so once again the guest bathroom floor will have to wait. We took a few pics of the yard. We have a looooong way to go with the landscaping but there are some nice things blooming.

The Wisteria is really starting to bloom, last fall I had to hack a bunch of it back to put the fence in.

Looks like we'll get some figs this year.

This is me in the Maple tree, there was a large dead branch that had fallen on the tree that needed to be removed.

Notice the Oak in the background of the second picture from the bottom. It doesnt look like it from the angle but even as high as I am I'm nowhere near the first branches of the Oak. That is one old, massive tree.

Automatic gate opener install

The automatic gate openers came yesterday, a day early. I went ahead and watched the install DVD just to be sure but everything was pretty straight forward. It was dark by the time I got it running so I'll be finishing the up the little things like cleaning up the wiring and installing the keypad today. Here's a few pictures of the system:



I still have to do some fine tuning. It's a pretty good system, the only thing I dont care for is the noise, it's a bit noisier than I expected. You cant hear it from inside the car though.

I also went to Ikea and bought the oak butcherblock countertops yesterday. I cant wait to install them. Here's a picture of one:

Guest Bathroom - Work begins

Yesterday I started on the guest bathroom. It still has it original floor and none of it is rotted, the bad news, it's very sloped. The wood is way too brittle to pull up without destroying it so I'm having to lay a new floor. Since we're running out of time on getting the house done I've decided to use the original floor as a sub-floor. I'll add shims to the low spots to level everything out. I hate to do it this way but I dont have a choice.

This is the room to begin with:



Before I could even begin on the floor I had to do something about the plumbing for the toilet. The plumbers used 3" Schedule 40 for the drain line. The problem with that is that the flange on many old toilets will not fit into a standard 3" toilet drain flange. The toilet going in this bathroom has an especially large flange on it. I'm having to go back and redo all three toilet drain flanges in the house because of this.

The way I fixed this in the main bathroom downstairs was to cut the drain a few feet back and use a 3" to 4" coupling, then run 4" pipe to a 4" flange. This wasn't a problem since the plumbing extends down into the crawlspace. The problem here is that there is no room for that. The plumbing is constrained by the 2"x10" floor/ceiling joists. Luckily I was able to find a 3" to 4" 90 degree elbow, the 4" flange will be attached to the elbow with a short piece of 4" pipe. Luckily, there will be just enough room since I'll be installing the new floor on top of the old floor.

The part circled in red is what I replaced, notice the 3" to 4" elbow.

The elbow from above.

With the plumbing taken care of I started carefully taking out the baseboards. This was a major pain as I'm trying not to get too much debris in the kitchen below which pretty much turned out to be an exercise in futility.

You can clearly see the kitchen below through the studs.

In removing the door sill I found more evidence that this wall was the original back of the house, the studs were cut off at the floor to make the door, this was most likely originally a window.

With the baseboards out of the way I cleaned up the floor and removed any stray nails in the way. I was now ready to begin shimming the floor.


The first step was to find the high point, this turned out to be the wall between the bathroom and bedroom(the original back wall of the house), luckily it's pretty much level all the way along this wall, from there it slopes down and to the right(if you're standing in the doorway). With stringline I measured the drop at each joist. The total drop ended up being just over 1 1/2" in the far corner. Using measurments at 3 points along each joist I cut the shims and installed them. So there is no confusion I write the measurement on the sub-floor and on each end of the shim as I cut it.


With the floor leveled I began laying the new floor.



Because of the shims I'm face-nailing the boards for the the extra strength the added depth gives. I'm using 8D cut-nails. You can really see how unlevel the original floor was because of the shadows in the second picture.

Hopefully I'll finish the floor today and begin demoing the walls and ceiling.