Sorry I haven’t updated lately. I have a lot of photos queued up but my desk computer seems to be broken so I turned it off a couple of days because I’m sure it just needs a nap:) at least thats what I’m telling myself because my last backup was 2 weeks ago and i do not want to know that I have lost all accounting for 3 different projects!!
Oh no, CB. I hope the nap does the trick.
I hope you back up your hard drive.
Progress and Photos
Back in business on the computer. Took hours yesterday getting my desktop computer to backup and sync to Google Drive so I don’t have a heart attack sometime in the future. Now the computer is dang slow as it tries to Sync every moment.
We are still in demo phase on the project. But, we have scraped off the popcorn ceilings in the garage and are taping, mudding and sanding the ceiling to get it painted. There is plastic draped everywhere that is blocking our investigations into the furnace and some other vents and pipes we need to look at.
We have found some significant issues in the house and I will try to explain them. It’s one of those “Who butchered this while trying to do X???”
Laundry cabinet upstairs - someone added a stackable laundry in a cabinet at the top of the stairs on top floor. I can understand why they would want to have laundry up there, but they obviously hacked it into the space. I kept searching for where the dryer lint was exiting the building (no output anywhere on exterior wall). Well, we discovered it… they hooked the dryer hose up at the top right of the closet and it was outputting lint for years and years into the dropped ceiling above the tub in the adjoining bathroom. We are going to have to punch a hole to exterior and get this fixed!!! Unfortunately, the easy fix is to have the output right above the front door 
Garage Bathroom - drain pipes have to have a vent to exterior to provide air in pipes for proper flow. We traced the drain vent pipe into the basement/storage room behind the garage. Guess what??? They ran it for about 15 ft and then just capped it off!! Have no idea how the toilet flushes properly. Probably just gravity fighting against the suction. Luckily, there are some vents available under the kitchen sink that we can tie into, so hopefully we do not have to take vents up 2 stories and out the roof with a new roof opening. We are trying desperately to use existing vents to avoid opening a new hole in a red clay tile roof.
Furnace - this one is a crazy mess. The large air intake for the furnace was a wall grill located just inside the front door on the left. The original builder had a giant 30" wide by 12" tall box inside a closet in the entry, with closet floor raised up and a grill underneath the closet. We have to route this completely differently because we are claiming the closet to expand the kitchen a bit in that corner. We need the space in the kitchen. We don’t use coat closets in California very much (I know this is a controversial subject, but they are not as common as they are in other areas of the country)
So, we tear off the top of the intake box and find that there is no big metal box in there, no metal pipe going through the floor over to the furnace. They had to butcher some floor joists and put some kind of weird metal box under the floor joists to allow air to flow between the bays. But, eventually there is just one empty bay between floor joists flowing air to the furnace across the house and down below in the garage. Well, it was empty until someone built the bathroom in the garage below. Without knowing it, whoever built that bathroom shoved a large exhaust fan up into the one bay that is flowing to the furnace. AND… get this… they output the exhaust hose right into the same enclosed bay between the floor joists. The bath was exhausting into an enclosed bay under the floor!!! As you can imagine, I found black moisture issues inside that bay. Same bay feeding air into the furnace system. What a freaking mess!
Original cast iron pipes. Luckily, we can see the main cast iron pipes running underneath all the plumbing because they are routed through the open storage area under the house. Yikes!!! cracked, leaking, disintegrating. So we get to add replumbing all the old cast iron into this project.
Photos loaded
GLAMOROUS TRASH HAULING
When we started this demo, I bought a big box of 50 construction hefty bags. By Day 4 the guys are telling me they are out of bags!! That is a massive amount of trash
On Thursday I rented a large 26 ft stake bed truck to haul trash away because we cannot get a dumpster into the area. Luckily my carpenter was a semi truck driver in a previous life because this thing is huge to try to maneuver and drive around It took 4 hrs x 3 guys just to haul stuff down the stairs and into the truck, including 2 large cast iron tubs, In the end it was the most expensive trash haul I’ve ever seen:
Truck Rental $200
Gas for truck $30
Fee at dump !!! $593
Yikes, $850 to haul 6 tons of trash to the dump.
Just crazy that anyone would hack a dryer vent! Most house fires start with dryers, with lint in the vent catching fire because of the high temperatures.
Blown in insulation?
That is what I was thinking!
Glamorous Poop Disaster Again!
I just don’t know what the odds are that we are always the recipients of some poop disaster. Today the guys came up from the garage to tell me “we need a plunger”. Normal operating procedure with my crew. Usually that’s the first thing we drag into a house. But somehow its lost and I get to rin into La Jolla to the local Ace Hardware and get one ASAP (very expensive store!!)
Now its backing up into the shower in the garage bathroom. Plunger doesn’t work so I dig through everything and find our little 10 ft snake. The guys go at it and they claim they"hit something" about 10 ft down. Uhhh ohhh, this is a job for the professionals.
My regular affordable drain company cannot come until tomorrow. Thats not going to cut it. I have 5 guys working here and theres no toilet or sink available! So, I call all the 'emergency drain ’ services in the phone book (well, google) and only one can come today, at a crazy price of course.
For those buying a house, or leaving a house vacant, this is common if the house has been vacant more than 3-4 months. Without water flowing, stuff solidifies in the pipes, especially cast iron.
Of course we are going to have to draw straws on who is going to clean up this mess. And guess who controls the straws:)
Oh yuck.
Lol CB. The crap fallout just happens, no matter what or where!
I hope your guys are all pooped out!
I worried that you might have a gross sewage surprise on this job but it seemed so unlikely that I poop-poohed the notion.
We are all OK now by 5pm. The drain guys were really nice and brought out their camera scope, at no charge, to check the clogged area to make sure everything OK. Luckily we are in good condition because we are going to change out all the cracked and disintegrated cast iron in the house but I cannot do anything about the line running under the garage
We are still doing demolition! It’s going on forever. It took 2 guys all day to smash out the entry tile because it was set in about 3” of concrete with steel mesh. It was crazy. That’s a lot of heavy stuff that has to be hauled away:) and to haul it I have to find a recycling center that will take it because we are under recycling requirements because our project is greater than 1,000 sq ft. Not sure how I am going to document that some guy named Kray took all the cabinets and appliances or that one of my workers took home most of the rolls of brand new carpet!! We may end up eating the $1,000 bond for recycling because I recycled the stuff in an undocumented manner.
Meanwhile I have a plumber and electrician busy redoing the stackable laundry closet and building the new bathroom upstairs. Unfortunately the owner has already fallen behind. He needs to select a bathtub and all the shower fixtures. He doesn’t understand why, but we need bathtub to set the drain location and because he cannot make up his mind whether he wants whirlpool or regular. Well, ummmm, we have to know that on whether to run electrical for a whirlpool. And we need shower valve to finish the plumbing in the wall. He thought that we could put those in later.
I loaded some original photos of the house and some progress photos to our Flickr group
Those pesky clients!
I just looked at the pictures.
- The previous owner is incredibly lucky that she/he didn't have a fire, given that dryer lint being pumped toward the furnace.
- With the plumbing pipes being high underneath the kitchen, is that going to cause a problem for inspection?
Tell your home owner - jetted tubs are a pita. Most are noisy. Unless he wants a very fancy one… the cheaper ones are crap. We are seriously thinking about getting rid of our fancy Jacuzzi and replacing it with a nice, big, two-person tub.
At least in my area, I have not seen a single jetted tub in new construction. And we poked through some very posh houses!
I tried to explain to him that it adds no value to the house and told him some buyers will be turned off because they have ‘cooties’ in the jets.
I can’t stand the idea of all those germs lurking in the jets.