Out The Roof

In the few short hours from the time I got my paycheck yesterday until it was all spent today I managed to make it to the hardware store to pick up supplies for the bathroom. I bought 50 feet of hemlock wainscot cap to hide the transition between the tile and plaster.

This is the same cap I used in the kitchen, and which I wrote about it 2 years ago when I installed it in the kitchen. The profile is very similar to the original wainscot cap from 1895 that was used in several of the rooms in the house. It looks almost the same, but it's not quite as meaty. I will prime it and get one top coat on before I install it, so that looks like Monday or Tuesday at the earliest. After that’s on, I can start to think about putting in the medicine cabinet and trimming out the window.

I also bought some 2-inch ABS and fittings, and a roof jack for the bathroom exhaust fan. It may surprise some to learn that I have finished walls and ceiling in the bathroom, but never ran the stack or the vent out the roof.

I retained the original beadboard ceiling and did not want to go through the hassle of removing part of it and putting it back up so I could run the vents out the roof. As it turns out, because the bathroom is part of the back porch elevation of the house, it has lower ceilings than the rest of the house. The bathroom has 9 foot ceilings and the rest of the downstairs has 10.5 foot ceilings. This means there is a 1.5-foot space on the laundry room side where I can work above the beadboard ceiling without disturbing it.

Today I ran the plumbing vent out the ceiling. Tomorrow I will run it up the rest of the side of the house and finish the bathroom exhaust fan. The first room I finished in the house was the upstairs bathroom, which is right above the bathroom I’m working on now. This means I can’t run the vent in the wall without destroying my beautiful plaster in the upstairs bathroom. It’s on the back of the house, so I’ll just paint the ABS the same Clarey Sage as the rest of the second story. It should be fine. Hmmmm, I hope ABS takes paint OK.

Tile Count: 93 sq ft ready for installation.

Pretty, Shiny Things & A FedEx Rant

Let’s start off with the rant and go from there. FedEx – Ugh! We live in a sparsely populated area. I get that. Does that mean that a huge corporation like FedEx can’t coordinate a little better between FedEx Air and FedEx Ground. Yes, that’s exactly what it means.

FedEx has NEVER tried to make a delivery to my house when I’m home. Never. They always come when I’m not here. Most of the times this is not an issue, but when a signature is required, it becomes a major issue. The FedEx Air facility is only a block from where I work. It is new, clean, and well staffed. The FedEx Ground facility is an “Un-Manned” facility about 12 miles away. You can’t call to arrange Will-Call because there is no one there during the day. You can call and leave a message, but they either ignore the messages or they get your message and then say, “Yea, right buddy. I don’t think so” as they press the delete button.

If you go to FedEx Air to try and talk to a real person it’s as if they have no idea that FedEx Ground even exists. So when I get a package from FedEx that requires a signature in person I’m forced to drive around town to try and find the FedEx truck that has my packages. That happened today. Actually it started yesterday because that was their first attempt. I think they try three times and then return the package to the sender if I don’t find them. Once yesterday and once today I spent about 20 minutes driving around town looking for the FedEx truck. The first truck I found was FedEx Express. I have no idea where they are located, but they’re not affiliated with FedEx Ground either and the guy was no help. On the second scouting expedition I found the truck with my boxes. Very frustrating!

Anyway, I got that off my chest, so lets move on to some pretty, shiny things. This is all the bounty from DEA Bath. This is why I was chasing the stupid FedEx guy all over town for the last two days. For some reason the bill came to a few hundred dollars less than I had originally figured. I wrote the order out in Excel, so the math is right. I know I got everything, but I’ll have to go over the invoice to find out where the difference is. I won’t show you all of it, but a few things are neat-o enough to warrant pictures.




The first two are of the sink trap for the vanity. It is 16 gauge nickel plated brass. It also has the cool little clean-out finial.


This is the new flush valve and rear spud for the high-tank. Also nickel plated brass. In fact, everything’s nickel plated brass


This is new flush tube and seat bumper for the high-tank. The seat bumper fits around the tube and then mounts to the wall. When you lift the seat up it hits the rubber bumper instead of the tube. There wasn’t enough room for one on the upstairs high-tank because the whole thing was too close to the wall, so I'm excited about the seat bumber.


This one’s not much to look at. It’s a 36-inch flexible supply pipe. It should be enough to do the supply lines for the sink and the toilet (fingers crossed). They start with flexible copper tubing and then plate it, so I should be able to bend it slightly in to shape so it can make the connections between the shut-off valves and the faucets.


That's it for now.

Once More In To The Ditch

I had a Petch House miracle today. I ran new natural gas lines for the dryer and for the bathroom heater and I did it with only one trip to the hardware store Gasp! I know, it’s pretty amazing. I mapped out the pipes. Measured under the house. Went to the store and bought the pipe and fittings. And everything fit on the first try! If you didn’t know any better you might start to think I know what I’m doing.

I started referring to my little home away from home under the house as “The Ditch”. It sort of feels like your laying in a ditch when you’re under there. Once you crawl under the house you have about 3 or 4 feet of level ground and then it starts to slop upwards. About 10 feet away there is a big tree stump under the house and all of the ground for a good 8 to 10 feet around it slopes up towards the stump. The stump is cut off about a few inches from the bottom side of the sub floor under the butler’s pantry. Because of the slope it feels like you’re laying in a ditch under there.

I’ve gotten accustomed to working around the stump, but went I first started working under the house a few years ago it was spooky with a capital S. The stump is still pretty much intact, but there a little cubby holes and nooks and crannies all around it. You just never know what the hell might be living in there.

More importantly than everything going smooth as silk with the pipe fitting was the fact that I had no leaks! Needless to say, natural gas leaks under the house are a bit more troublesome than water leaks. They are also a lot harder to detect. Gas is lighter than air and so it will collect in the joist bays and pool until a spark sends your house flying off the foundation. They make a soapy solution you can use to help find leaks. You brush it on the fittings and watch for bubbles. That is helpful if you know you have a leak and you’re trying to find it.

What I do is when I cut off the gas before I start working I write down the readings on the meter and use those as a bench mark to see if everything is OK when I turn it back on. I also close all the valves where the pipe feeds in to appliances in the house. After everything is hooked back up I wait an hour or so and look for any changes in the meter. I used to wait over night but I feel more confident now. After running dozens of yards of gas pipe, with hundreds of fittings I’ve had only one leak the whole time.

That one leak was when I plumbed most of the house for natural gas a few years ago. Residential natural gas runs at about a quarter of a PSI. Very, very low pressure. To get inspected I had to fill the pipes up with 20 PSI of air and then the inspector would come by and watch the gauge for a few minutes to make sure it didn’t drop. If it dropped that meant I had a leak. Twenty PSI is about 80 times normal pressure the gas lines will see.

Anyway, I got everything hooked up and filled the pipes with 20 PSI of air and I had just the tiniest of leaks. It was so slight that at 10 PSI it didn’t even leak. I crawled around under the house for days brushing on the sudsy leak solution trying to find the leak and I couldn’t find it. It was so frustrating. I went to some on-line plumbing forums and one guy suggested I go up to 30 PSI and mix up a solution of half dishwashing liquid and half water and brush that on. Sure enough that worked.

I had a plug in a T fitting that was supposed to be for my future laundry room dryer. The plug was a piece of crap, or maybe it got a little dirt in it, or whatever. I replaced the 39 cent plug with a new one and the leak went away. That T with the plug is the very same T fitting I hooked everything up to today. That’s what made me think of it.

Last Piece Of The Plumbing Puzzle

And it is a puzzle. This small area of the house - 10X6 feet - now has pipes and drains for two bathrooms and a laundry room under it. Along with that, the first floor sub panel is on the wall just opposite this space, and there are two CAT5 and two coaxial cables from the second floor that feed right up through this area as well. If you remember that old “Pipes” screen saver, well picture that with a bunch of romex and telecom cables thrown in to the mix. It’s a wonder I didn’t fry anything with the soldering torch.

It took three tries to fix the stupid leak in the stupid pipe from yesterday. In the past when I’m faced with one of these pin-hole leaks I’ve been able clean the copper around the leak, apply a little flux, and then resolder. It wouldn’t work this time. I eventually had to take the thing apart, clean it all real good, and then resolder. What a pain.

Someone yesterday suggested poor quality flux might have been the problem. While I’m sure there is crappy flux out there I happen to know I use the same brand as the largest plumbing concern in town. No, I think the problem was that I didn’t clean the copper well enough. I have this 4-in-1 pipe cleaner that will clean the inside and outside of half inch and three-quarter inch pipe. It’s pretty worn out and dirty. I think that was the culprit. Anyway, it’s done, so let’s move on.

That last piece of puzzle is the gas line for the dryer in the laundry room and a wall heater in the bathroom. A few years back I planned for this so I have a ¾-inch T on the main gas line with a plug in it ready to go. It’s just under the floor. I would say it’s maybe 12 feet of pipe, another T, 2 elbows, and two valves. I predict 14 trips to the hardware store.

I probably won’t use the heater that is going in the bathroom very often. It is an old unvented radiant gas heater I bought on everyone’s favorite bottomless money pit called Ebay. It doesn’t meet code and I won’t use it that much, but if I put it in the wall I want it to work. It’s mostly eye candy, but it should at least function.

I’ll wait for someone to gasp in horror that I have an unvented natural gas appliance in the bathroom and then I’ll exclaim how I use it all the time and it’s the greatest thing in the world. I’ll then bend down and turn it on and watch as they bolt from the room with their hand covering their mouth and nose to escape the deadly emissions emanating form the appliance. Oh, what fun it’ll be.



That’s the heater in question. There are 3 ceramic radiant that go in the black area. I think it’s kind of neat. For real heat for the bathroom I want to put a “warm floor” under the tile. I’ve been looking a few models on line and they aren’t cheap. It’s just some wire and a programmable thermostat and they start around $500. At least the ones I looked at are they much. Oy! This bathroom is going to break me.

The State Of The Bathroom

The state of the bathroom is good, but there are some problems.

One of the immutable laws of The Universe states that no matter how many copper joints I solder in one day one of them will have a pin hole leak. If I solder two joints, one will leak. If I solder three joints, one will leak. If I solder 500 joints, one will leak. This law is written just for me and today it played out exactly as it was written, but that wasn’t the worst part.

Before I get to the dumb mistake I made (not the leaky solder) I want to say that I really don’t care for working with copper. In my opinion the PEX method, even though I’ve never used it, is much better. It’s not available around here, so it wasn’t an option for me. Of all of the mechanical things in the house like plumbing, electrical, and gas lines, the copper joint seems the least accurate. I can attach two wires together with a wire nut and pull on them as hard as I can. If they come apart I didn’t do it right. I tighten down a pipe and you can feel it tighten. With the copper solder you prep the pipe ends, you heat it, and then put on the solder. It looks fine. You can pull on it and twist it and it seems secure, but you don’t know it’s a good solder until you turn on the water and see if there is a leak. It’s very frustrating.

To make matters worse, once there is water in the pipe it makes it even harder to repair the leak. As you heat the pipe any water, even a very small amount near the joint you are trying to fix, will boil and turn to steam from the heat of the torch. If you are soldering near an open valve the steam can escape out the valve. If not, the steam tries to escape out the joint you are trying to repair. There are a few tricks to employ, but this mostly means cutting the pipe some place to release the steam. Now you have another repair to make. It’s all very frustrating.

My leak today was, oddly enough, the very first solder I made. It was just a tiny, tiny pin-hole leak. Now though, once I’ve discovered it, I now have the pipes filled with water under pressure. It’s 5:30 at night, I’m hungry, and tired and I’m in no mood to drain the pipes and try to make the repair. Instead, I wrapped a towel around the leak, filled up the tub, shaved, brushed my teeth, and then went and shut off the water. I’ll fix it tomorrow.

Aside from the leak, the rest went well, except for the one minor mistake I mentioned earlier. The last thing I do is cap off the pipes above the floor where the valves will eventually go. I leave the pipes uncapped so as I solder pipes under the floor any steam that accumulates in the pipes from residual water will have a place to escape. The very last thing I do is cap the pipes and then turn the water back on and check for leaks. Well, I forgot to cap the pipe for the toilet. When I turned on the water I had a major geyser in the bathroom. It’s just sub floor, so it’s not the end of the world. The only real problems is that the water drained down through the floor and soaked the ground under the bathroom. This is where I have to go tomorrow to repair the pin-hole leak. Bummer.

I Miss The Nickel & Diming

Today I made a large purchase from DEA Bath for some shiny nickel plated bathroom things. It’s all the exposed plumbing and some assorted toilet parts. It’s going to come to over $1,100 once shipping and taxes are factored in. Ouch! I know it’s very un-American but I hate spending money and I hate having debt.

The debt is very minor at this point. I sort of got a little behind when I was doing the kitchen and the idea was to pay it off when I was painting the exterior, which was relatively affordable. I’m not sure what happened, but I finished painting the house and I still had the debt. Now it’s growing. It’s a home equity loan, and I’m investing it in the home, so it’s not the end of the world. I just like to complain about it. Now that I’ve done the complaining we can move on.

At the beginning of December I called DEA Bath about selling them some vintage toilets and sinks that I didn’t need. I was going to get store credit for some of the plumbing parts I wanted. The biggest item was going to be a marble vanity. Because the vanity has exposed plumbing, I needed to get that item nailed down before I could rough in plumbing and electrical. I spoke with a guy named Tim Daley and he was about as unhelpful as anyone could possibly be.

This is not run-of-the-mill, garden verity stuff I’m dealing with. I’m rebuilding a 100 year old toilet, sink and tub. I had a few questions and he was unable to answer them. At first it was fine because I know that not everybody is an expert. I would give him a few things to follow up on and I would call back in a few days and he had not followed up on them. He wasn’t able to get me pictures of the vanities I asked for, and he seemed not to know the inventory well. He would email me work orders to review and he would have part numbers and pricing wrong. It was annoying but I tried to be patient.

Finally, after about three weeks in to this I started to get very impatient with him. I told him I was going to be driving down with the vintage plumbing parts and I needed to make arrangements. I asked him when he thought he would have all the parts I ordered ready for me. The idea was that I would pick up everything I ordered at the same time, and save money on shipping. Tim’s answer was, “It’ll be ready, when it’s ready”.

That was pretty much the end of it. I told Tim I was taking my plumbing parts else where. I would buy the vanity else where, and maybe if he had time in a month or two I would call back for some of the other parts. A lot of this was done via email and after I emailed them saying I was taking my business else where I got a call from the owner. I was so disappointed at this point that I did return his call.

I’ve dealt with DEA Bath in the past and my last experience was exactly the opposite as this. I didn’t handle this well at all. The first time I felt that Tim was dropping the ball I should have asked to speak to the manager. Eventually my short fuse ran out and as a matter of principle I couldn’t go back. The trouble is, there are some things DEA Bath has that I can’t get other places. So today I called them and placed an order.

I got a guy named Jim this time. He was very knowledgeable and very helpful. He knew the inventory and what parts go with what parts. I gave him a wrong part number at one point – I transposed two numbers - and he immediately stopped me and questioned it. I told him the part name and he knew exactly what I was talking about. I asked him if all the parts were in stock and with out putting down the phone he assured me they were and it would ship tomorrow. I really wished I had gotten Jim the first time.

If you have vintage plumbing in your house and someone tells you it can’t be repaired because the parts aren’t available, call DEA Bath first. They really are good people and know their shit. However, if a guy named Tim answers the phone either ask for someone else, or hang up and call back later.

My Mind Is In The Sewer

Woo-Hoo! The sewer lines for the new bathroom are all hooked up to the main sewer line for the house. Gary came over and helped me with it, or, really I guess I should say, Gary came over and I helped him with it. I was very nervous about this. Digging up something that’s been in the ground since 1895, modifying it, and then burying it again makes me nervous. I had fears of finding a crumbling, rotted sewer line that needed to be replaced. It turned out it was in very good shape.

It switched from cast iron to clay pipe about 6 feet out in the yard so we cut in to the clay and the cast iron to put in the new fittings. Here’s some shots…



The little stretch of ABS you see at the top I put in yesterday. This is the new washing machine drain on the left, and then I finished what a started last year with the upstairs bathroom sink. That is the part that goes to the right. The piece you see on the bottom went to one of the old rental bathrooms. In the picture it has already been cut off and capped. This was all under the addition at one time.



Ta-da! The new sewer is all hooked up. We added a clean-out, which the house never had. It went pretty smooth. Gary was much more meticulous about measuring at putting everything together than I was on the parts under the house. He also used a lot more adhesive than I did. I hope I won’t have problems down the road. I don’t think I will.



And finally, here it is all buried again. Whew! When everything was hooked up and we were gathering up tools and such I made the awkward move to pay Gary for his time. He’s given me lots of plumbing supplies over the years, and bought lots of plumbing supplies for me at cost, and given me tons and tons of advice, but he’s never actually done any physical work for me. This was a first and I wanted to compensate him. In the past even when I didn’t give him actual currency, I always made it up to him in some way. What passed between us were neighborly gestures.

Yesterday I had to run over to his house for something. When I walked up he was getting in to his truck and it was all loaded up for a job. He said he was doing another bathroom for a friend. This one was much more involved than mine. It consisted of a shower, tub, toilet, bidet, and double sink. He made diagrams with pipe sizes and elevations. It was done very nice and very professional looking. He showed me everything he had drawn up for the guy and there was a parts list with prices. As I was looking at the parts list he said, “This guys not a neighbor, so I’m charging him for all of the parts and the drawing”. Gary wasn’t actually doing the work, he was just supplying all the right parts and giving advice on code and requirements. The cost for the parts for all the drains and copper came to $139.

So I went to the bank today and got 2 crisp $100 bills. My parts came to a lot less than $139 because mine was a smaller bathroom and a lot of it just came out of his garage. It’s just left over stuff. It was kind of tough to come up with an amount. I feel I might insult him if I give him too little or if I give him too much. Every time I’ve ever tried to give him money for parts or help he tries to give it back. So as we were finishing up today I said, “Well, I’m going to insult you if I give you too much or too little so take this and let me know if you need more”. I gave him the two bills folded and he said, “Oh, $100, no that’s fair”. I said, “Uh, no, there’s two of them.”

He immediately started in that it was too much money and I immediately cut him off. I ask him how much all this work would have cost if I brought in a professional to do it and he said it would have been around $2,000 for plumbing a new bathroom and tying in to the sewer. We also did the laundry room. I said, so take the $200. It’s more than fair and I feel guilty about giving you so little. He says something about taking his wife out for a nice dinner and then asked if I’m sure I can afford it. It’s a nice little dance. It’s a part of what makes society bearable. Even so, there was a part of me that feels I should have given him more. Maybe he was insulted and he was just being nice.

We gathered up the tools and extra parts and headed back over to his garage. I went on and on about how I was relieved about having that done (I really am) and I mentioned that now all I have to do is run the copper under the floor and all the plumbing will be done. Gary immediately ask if I have enough copper and fittings. I said I think I did and he pulls out 2, 10-feet pieces of half inch copper and hands them to me. He then grabs a bag of 50, half inch copper elbows and hands those to me. “You can never have enough of these. Just use what you need and bring back the rest.” I awkwardly and grudgingly excepted it.

He then asked me about the vanity and tub I’m putting in. He has a bunch of those flexible braided supply lines. He pulls open a drawer full and asks, “Do you need any of these”. I tell him how I want to do the ridged, nickel plated supply lines because the plumbing under the sink will be exposed. He pulls open another drawer and hands me 3 pairs he salvaged from some place. I said I only need one pair and he says, “Some of the plating is a little warn so use the best ones, and just bring back the rest”. I’m really starting to feel awkward now. We chat for a little while longer and I as I head back across the street with my latest cache of plumbing supplies I’m thinking to myself, if Gary was insulted and thought the $200 I gave him was not enough, he sure has a funny way of showing it.

A Neat Little Do-Hickey

I spent about 4 hours under the house today and it was sooooo much fun I think I’ll do it some more tomorrow. I’d say I got about 95% of the drains run under the house and about half the vents run above the floor. It took one more trip to Gary’s garage and one trip to the hardware store. I knocked over an almost full jar of ABS glue and was too embarrassed to go ask Gary for another one, so I went and shelled out $5.00 for a new can.

Gary stopped by to see how things were going. He said I mounted the drains too high off the ground, but this is not so much a drainage issue as it is an ease of work issue. I found out the hard way that it’s easier to hook everything together if it’s not so close to the joists. In the end it worked, so that’s what’s important. Tomorrow he’ll come over and we’ll tie it all in to the main sewer line. After that I just have to finish the copper under the house and the plumbing will be done. Wooo-Hooo!

And this brings us to the Neat Little Do-Hickey. They are called pipe insulators, I think. Before I explain them, here’s a few shots.





These things are great for running pipes under the house. You drill a one and three eights inch hole where you want the pipe to go. The little insulator as two flanges on it. You put it around the copper water pipe and press it in so only one flange is in the hole. It holds the pipe exactly where you want it, but you can still slide it up and down from under the house to fine tune the position. Once the pipe is connected to the rest of the plumbing you push the insulator in all the way and it seals the hole so no drafts or bugs can come up in the wall. Then screw it in to place and that pipe aint going no where. It is a great little invention.

Shopping At Gary’s

I thought I was going to get together with Gary on Sunday to go over the drains for the new bathroom. For those who don’t keep up, Gary is my neighbor who has been a plumber for 40+ years and has helped more than I can think of when it comes to all the new plumbing I’ve put in the house. Really, every last piece of water and gas pipe just about as been replaced in the house and Gary either gave me the parts or bought them for me at the wholesale cost, and then gave me detailed instructions on how to put in all in and meet code.

We didn’t get together on Sunday as planned so I started in on the copper supply lines myself. A lot of times this stuff isn’t rocket science but it is helpful when you have someone who can look at your work and tell you that you’re doing it right and it will pass inspection, or more importantly, tell you when you are doing it wrong. This is in addition to the tools he’s more than happy to lend me. Did you know they make a special saw just for ABS?

Anyway, today we went over the whole thing. This is a bathroom from scratch so for someone with my skill level it’s pretty involved. We started with a simple lesson on the different types of fittings and where they are used. Two parts can look similar but have two very different uses. He then came over and I showed him where everything was going to go. I try and be very well prepared when he comes over. I mark all bathroom fixtures with screws drilled in to the floor or wall where I think the center of the drain will go. I mark all places where there is a clear shot through the ceiling for vents. I also dug up the sewer line in the side yard and marked on the side of the house where the center of the toilet will be on the inside.

We spent about 10 minutes in the room and he looked around at what was going on. We then headed back over to his garage where he has crates of ABS fittings and dozens of feet of ABS ranging in size from inch and a half to 4 inches. We went over the whole thing and I started to get a little lost. It’s not really difficult, but it is something you have to think about, or at least I do. Gary can just see it in his head and parts just start flying out of crates. In no time at all I have 2 milk crates full of fittings, several lengths of pipe, a right angle drill and all the bits, saws, ABS cement, and a roof jack. I have to make 4 trips to get it all home.

There were a few parts he didn’t have so while I was laying it all out in the bathroom he ran down to the shop where he works and picked up a few more things. When he got back he checked my work and made a few changes. Tomorrow I’ll start drilling holes and gluing everything up and then sometime in the next day or two we’ll cut in to the sewer line I dug up and tie everything in.

To Gary this is nothing. I think he enjoys helping me, which is great for him. For me the benefits are incalculable. Just not having to run to the hardware store a dozen times over the next 5 days makes his help worth it. If I had to pay someone to do this it would run over a $1,000, I’m sure. Most of the stuff I could probably figure out with a book and a lot of thinking, but this just makes it so much easier. I can’t even begin to tell you.

Electric: Done-diddely-un

I was able to finish up the wiring today in the bathroom, and took care of a few other issues in the proposed laundry room at the same time. It wasn’t too bad, but it did require a few wonderful trips under the house to crawl around in the dirt and cat poop (I think I’m feeding those cats too much). It also required 3 more trips to the hardware store. I think that makes 8 in all.

I still haven’t found a 3-inch roof vent for the bathroom fan, but I’ve decided to wait on that until after the plumbing’s done anyway. When I talked to my neighbor Gary a few days ago about the rough-in plumbing, I mentioned that I was almost finished with the wiring. He mentioned that plumbing should be done before wiring. I’m not sure if this is just a plumber’s point of view or if that’s the way it’s normally done. I can see that if you had a lot of wires in the way it might make it more difficult to run pipes for water and drains. We’ll see if it’s an issue.

When I rewired the whole house a few years back it was about as major a rewire as you can do. The house had a total of 4 outlets in the walls. The main panel was from 1951 and all of the ceiling fixtures were still using the 1895 wiring which fed from a “panel” in the attic. I replaced EVERYTHING from the utility poll on down.

When I got to the butler’s pantry and scullery I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with these areas. I made the decision at the time that the scullery was going to be the downstairs bathroom, and that’s what I’m doing now. I went ahead and wired that room with it’s own dedicated 20-amp circuit.

The butler’s pantry was another story. As far as butler’s pantries go, this is kind of a large one. I knew I wanted a laundry room in part of it, but I couldn’t really make a decision at the time, so I wired it as a normal room. That means an electrical outlet every 6-feet along the walls. Now fast forward 2 years and I partitioned the room for a smaller butler’s pantry and a laundry room. When I did this, not only did I orphan two outlets in the “laundry room” but when I removed the beadboard they were left hanging in the air.

To make a long story short, since the lights for the bathroom are tied in to the circuit that runs the outlets in the butler’s pantry, I went ahead and got rid of those extra outlets that ended up in the some-day-to-be laundry room. When I do the laundry room I will give it a dedicated 20-amp GFCI circuit.

OK, Gary, I’ll Let You Help

As part of our agreement for the HAJOCA toilet I said I would grab whatever garbage Gary had and take it with me when ever I made a dump run. Neither of us pays for city garbage service, and neither of us really enjoys going to the dump. I don’t pay for it mainly because of the work I’m doing on my house. I seem to be making dump runs anyway, so I just take the garbage cans with me. It works out well. Gary rarely has more than 2 garbage sacks, so it’s really no big deal.

In addition to taking his garbage when ever I go to the dump I slipped his wife $50 for the toilet. It’s a great deal for me because he’s saved me so much money on plumbing that the garbage and the $50 doesn’t even begin to make up for it.

I told myself this time I wasn’t going to lean on Gary so much for the bathroom. It’s sort of the general issue of me not wanting to ask for help, but it also goes back to the fact that he’s helped me so much in the past, it just feels odd to keep asking.

Today when I got off work Gary, his wife, and their little girl were all sitting on the front stoop of their house across the street. It was a pleasant afternoon and they were just sort of hanging out. I was planning to go to the dump today so I strolled over to chat and to see if he had anything that needs to go to the dump. As I walked across the street I kept repeating to myself, “Don’t ask about plumbing. Don’t ask about plumbing. Don’t ask about plumbing.”

There has been one code question that has been gnawing at me, though. I don’t know how to size the vent for the drain. If I have a 4-inch drain for the toilet, does that mean I need a 4-inch vent stack going all the way up the side of the house. I was planning to call the building department about this today because it could be an issue. There is plenty of room for a 2-inch vent. Three inch would be tight. A 4-inch vent would cause a lot of problems.

I chatted with Gary for a good 15 minutes about everything but plumbing. In the end he said he had a few sacks and he would toss them in the back of my truck. I told him I would be going to the dump in an hour or so. As I walked away he said to me, “Now, when you get to that bathroom plumbing you let me know if you need anything”. I said, “No, no, no this time I’m doing it myself, but I do have one question about code, though”. I couldn’t resists.

I asked him about the vent. I couldn’t help myself. As he explained it to me, all of the vents on the house must equal the diameter of the main sewer line, and the bathroom vent can’t be less than 2-inches. That’s beautiful because I have a 4-inch sewer line and I already have 2, 2-inch vents. I can do a 2-inch vent for the new bathroom and there will be plenty of room for it.

After we talked about the vents Gary was emphatic that I not go to the hardware store for parts. I told him I don’t feel good about getting all that stuff from him. He goes on and on about how it’s all just sitting there and it doesn’t cost him anything. It’s all just leftover parts. He’s telling me about stuff he’s given away in the past week or so and goes on and on about how he’s dieing to get some of the crap out of his garage. How could I say no? I’m practically doing him a favor.

In the end, he wore me down. We agreed that I would use stuff from his garage and he will come over next Sunday and help me lay out the drain system and the adjoining laundry room. The guy has been a plumber for 40 years and he has every tool and every part imaginable. He’s going to help me lay everything out. He’ll supplying me with all the proper tools. I’ll do all the installation, and then when it comes time, he’ll help me tie everything in to the main sewer line.

All I can say is, he had better generate a lot of garbage, because I am going to owe him big-time for this one.