New water heater

First thing is to drill a hole through the side of the house.  I did a 6" hole for a 4" pipe so I could wrap the pipe in an inch of fiberglass so it doesn't get too hot on the wood.

I borrowed my neighbor's 6" hole saw, so I had to stop every inch or so to break out the wood so I could keep going.  There was about 11" inches of wood, so it ended up taking about 5 hours to get through.

Since this is just temporary, I just used a few pieces of wood out of my pile down there to mount it.

And since the outside of my house looks like shit anyway, I figured I'd just go full redneck on it.  I also plan on switching to a condensing type later, so that would require different holes anyway.

Getting ready to remove the chimney

The truck took longer than I thought, but it's mostly done and running much better now, so I should be getting more done again.  When I was waiting for parts (again) I moved a bunch of the old wood that was just sitting in the upstairs that I definitely would not be needing for the rest of the upstairs into the basement.  So here're some pictures of that

In order to take out the chimney, I'd need to vent the water heater out the side of the house.  Since this is a normal gas one, I'd need an active vent to do that.  Since I don't want to be investing money in that, I decided to get a cheap ($150) tankless one to hold me over until I redo the stuff in the basement.  I plan on installing it next weekend.  Funny thing, all the stuff to hook this thing up is costing as much as the water heater...

Main walls done

Before I started on my truck a few weeks ago, I thought I would finish up the last wall.  Then I built half of it, and realized with the order I put the walls up in, I couldn't actually get it where I needed to...

So at this point I decided I was done and was just going to work on my truck for awhile.  A few weeks later, when I was waiting for parts I figured I'd move the stuff in the master bedroom so I could just build them in there, and that worked out