Trench time

At the same time as taking the chimney out, we also worked on digging a new trench between the house and garage for new wiring.  I rented a mini excavator which was fun, and since it was a holiday weekend I got to pick it up Friday at 3pm and return it on Monday morning and still just pay for 1 day.  Even with running it for probably around 10 hours, it only burned about 3 gallons of diesel, so that was cool.

Here it is after most of the trench was done.  We couldn't get under the porch all the way, so we ended up digging that out by hand later.  It's about 4' deep.

I put 3, 2" conduits in it, so I can use one for the new feeder (hopefully 100A), one for the lighting and other random power stuff, and one for data/maybe gas.  We put in the first section of pipe and backfilled it so we could run the excavator close to the deck for getting the hand-dug dirt out easier

Here was starting to backfill the rest of it

And all graded (although not well)

I'm not sure when I'll actually run the conduits into the buildings, but at least this part is done now.

Chimney be gone

I decided to borrow my neighbor's scaffolding since it's safer and also more fun.  I forgot to take a picture of it after the guard rails were up though.

I took down the satellite dishes first, and it was surprising how easily they bent when I threw them to the ground.  And of course there were wasps living in one of them.

I also took out the 2 plumbing roof vents that I didn't need anymore since I was up there.  The ladder going from the scaffolding to the roof really helped the scaffolding's stability (not that it was bad before that).

We had to move the scaffold, and my neighbor and I only saw three options.  Take the whole thing down and set it up again, extend it to get over to where we needed it, or push it with my truck, so obviously we pushed it.

And now on to the chimney... The cap was cement, and I'm guessing it's as old as the master bedroom addition from what I guess is the 40's, so there was a ton of erosion around the rocks in the concrete which was cool.

And this was the setup on the scaffold on the chimney

My friend came up from Chicago to film taking the chimney down, but it ended up being super uneventful since the bricks just came apart with almost no effort, so who knows if that's going to be able to be turned into a video at all.  It was pretty amazing how nearly impossible it was to stand on without just sliding down with all the sand from the mortar on the roof, so I ended up using my new air compressor to blow all of it down.  Here it is with the hole in the roof filled

And then the shingles

What the roof looks like now

I took the shingles from the back porch roof since it'll be coming down anyway

Tub and sink plumbing

I put the sink drain and vent first, but I didn't follow the diagram from the inspector since I had to change it from a double to a single sink.  So I forgot about I ended up forgetting about the orientation of the fittings, so I had to rotate them...

Of course the tub drain had to end up directly over a joist...so I had to notch (and reinforce) it, in addition to not being able to do the overflow connection normally.  This is how I was going to do it:

I sent the picture to the inspector before I glued anything since I wasn't sure if it was ok, and it was a good thing since it turns out you're not supposed to use the sanitary T's horizontally like that.  So after input from him I did it like this:

This is how it all looked when it was done, and I just have the pipe ending in the basement for now.

I also forgot and left a window without a screen open over night, and ended up with a bird inside.  It seemed to like my suspended extension cords.  At least it was a nice change from bats since I could just leave the door open for it to fly out.

Tub and sink placement

After work I took the tub & walls and sink out of their boxes to see how they fit so I could mark for where the plumbing needed to go.  I really wanted to use a dual sink vanity, but I would have had to move the doorway over a few inches and there still wouldn't have been a gap between it and the tub which would look weird.

So I had to return it and get a single...

New plumbing stack

To remove all the old cast iron stack, I had to cut into the wall in the living room, so I thought I should set up some dust extraction (it worked pretty well).

I thought I should have the city residential plumbing inspector come by before I started so he hopefully wouldn't make me redo everything in the basement since it is very much not up to code, and it's how I bought the house.  He was good with it since I'll be ripping it out anyway, and he actually drew me a bunch of diagrams of how to plumb everything, and even included a parts list.  So that was absolutely amazing and about the opposite of what I expected from a city inspector.

He also told me I should plug the stack so stuff doesn't fall down while I'm pulling the old one out and end up clogging it.  And there was a ton of stuff that fell so I'm very glad I did, but I also flushed the toilet while it was plugged and made a mess in the basement...  At least I remembered fast enough that I was able to run into the basement to watch the water come out.

I also decided to just rent a nice soil pipe cutter instead of getting a cheap one or using my sawzall, it worked amazingly and it took less than an hour to get all the old pipe out.

The inside of the pipe that was horizontal for the toilet was disgusting:

A lot of the point of cutting out the old stack was to make it so there wasn't plumbing in the corner of the dining room, which meant moving it to the other side of that wall, and instead of doing funky shit in the basement to tie this into the old stack, I decided to just make it cross over on the first floor, and deal with it later, since I would be redoing stuff regardless.

Before starting on the toilet part upstairs, I decided to reinforce the drop ceiling since it was starting to look like it collapse at any time.

I didn't take many pictures for the toilet, but it was super convenient that there was already a roof vent I could use, so I was able to get it all finished that weekend.

Crown plates and valley jacks

I didn't work on the house last week because I ended up needing to work...so that was great.  This week I decided to wrap up a few things that I needed to do.  First was the crown plates, which was pretty boring, but it's done now

The valley jacks were a complete pain since they're being put in at the wrong time.  First thing I did was put up some boards up for a reference

As I saw it, there were really only 2 ways to figure out all the angles I'd need, doing all the trigonometry or just do a bunch of cutting until I got it right.  I really didn't want to re-learn trig, so I did trial and error

There were 5 angles on the final valley jack, the two 21 degree angles that were there for the drywall to attach to, the 21 degree angle on the opposite side from that so the valley jack mounted correctly to the roof, the 27.5 - 30 degree angle to make it go at the same angle as the roof, and 45-50 degree angle since the valley in the roof is about a 45 degree angle from the other rafters and ceiling joists.  I took some pictures of it, but the angles really don't come across well on camera.

And this is what it looks like after being mounted

Luckily the other side was basically the same, so it went significantly faster.  But I also cut off a part for it to fit on the top of the wall in the corner

And this is what it looked like mounted, on both of them I pre-drilled all the holes for the screws so I didn't crack the wood

Last thing was putting the other false rafters for the drywall to attach to