Re-Volting

Sometimes there just aren't enough electrons to go around.

Whole-house electricity was fairly progressive stuff when this house was built (as was indoor plumbing). There's knob-and-tube wiring throughout the house, but not nearly enough to serve today's needs. Each room has just one or two outlets, and they're rarely grounded. This is particularly annoying -- and dangerous -- in the kitchen. Where did those silly Victorians expect to plug in a microwave oven?

Simply adding more outlets around the kitchen won't really solve our problem. The wiring itself is overtaxed, and there are only so many circuit breakers in the service panel. So...

... we're adding a second service panel in the laundry room. Here she be.

To feed the panel, the electricians are running a big beefy electrical cable from the original service entrance, under the house, up through the walls to the second/third floor, then across the ceiling and down to this panel. It's the long way around, but the electrons don't care and it avoids running conduit on the outside of the house.

Since the kitchen is pretty much smack dab in the center of the house, this gives us a good opportunity to run shiny new wiring to almost all the other rooms. The kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, dining room, master bedroom, and two of four rooms upstairs are all accessible from here. For the ones that aren't, we're tossing new "home run" wiring in the crawlspace anyway so we can fish it out later.

I had the electrician toss in some CAT5, telephone, and RG-6 cable, too. You just never know.

Ah, modern technology.

A Tankless Job

Behold, the mighty tankless water heater!

Today we* replaced the second of our two** water heaters with a brand spanking new tankless style water heater. It's the latest thing in water-warming-upping technology. It has no reservoir tank; it heats the water in real-time as it passes through your pipes.

This saves energy, since you're not heating a tankful of water you may not need. It also means you never run out of hot water, no matter how much you use. It just keeps heatin' as long you you keep usin' hot water. Hellooo, long showers.

For you plumbing nerds, this is a Navien NP-240A. Made in Korea, with a built-in recirculating pump. So not only does it heat water, but it reuses already-heated water from the pipes whenever possible.

Some of the extraneous copper pipe you see is left over from the installation, and some is preparation for the water softener, which comes tomorrow.

Here's a shot of its predecessor, looking a bit old and forlorn.

* It was really the plumber. I watched.
** There were actually three water heaters in the house, but #1 and #2 were removed earlier. Keep up, will ya?

Status: Floor

Waiter, there's a hole in my floor!

In order to move the bar sink to its new location in a freestanding island, we (okay, the plumbers) had to move the hot, cold, and drain pipes into the middle of the room. That requires pulling up some floorboards, the result of which you see here.

The floor is redwood tongue-and-groove. The boards don't really want to come up, so the guys cut the tongues off, so to speak, and pried up the boards from one end. That exposed the floor joists and gave them room to bury the water pipes, which they finished doing today.

In the meantime, we've got this ankle trap in the middle of the room. With a nice view of more knob-and-tube wiring below.

Out With the Old, In With the New

The plumbers are mostly done. At least, that's what we're telling ourselves.

The only absolutely necessary bit of plumbing in this whole project was to move the "bar sink" about 24" to a new location. Simple, right?

Except that we thought we'd take the opportunity to right some ancient wrongs. The house has a lot of really old pipes, and some of the nastier ones were about to break or rust through. So we decided that all the old plumbing was coming out. We told the plumbers, if you can reach it and it's not modern, it comes out. And on a three-story house with two kitchens and three bathrooms, that's a lot of old pipe.

But it's for the best. Once they started following some of the old pipe upstairs, downstairs, and through walls, they discovered some nasty stuff. The waste line from the third-floor bathroom, in particular, was cracked clear through and so rusty you could knock chunks off with your fist. Ewww.

So that's all gone, replaced with modern ABS. On the supply side, most of the hot- and cold-water pipes were badly corroded, so they've been replaced with Pex, a modern flexible hose. Terrific stuff, Pex. Buy stock in the company.

An Awesome Stud*

This bit of timber is now part of our kitchen doorway. It's a massive 4x12 chunk of solid pine. It took two guys to lift it off the ground, and a Sawzall to cut it to size.

Want to guess how much it cost? Twenty bucks.

Apparently it pays to show up at the lumberyard with a big truck and a contractor's license.

*(Yes, I know, it's a header, not a stud.)

Is That a Door In Your Pocket?

Boy, am I glad to see you.

This is the first real bit of construction in our kitchen. Everything up until now has been demolition, but this door represents the first step in actual improvement. Or at least, of change.

This was a typical swing-out door, between the kitchen the the laundry room. It's got the same fan pattern on its lower panel that many other doors in the house have. We wanted to keep the door but we didn't like the way it swung into the kitchen, blocking part of the walkway. (In the old layout, it also completely blocked the refrigerator.) So we turned it into a pocket door.

Evidently you can get pocket-door kits from the lumberyard. The builders just measured the door and picked up the appropriately sized kit, and off they went. This little project was done in a few hours.

Day One is off to a good start.

Nailed It!

One of the interesting little bits to come out of the kitchen demolition is the nails. The lath and plaster is all gone now, filling four trailers to haul away the detritus.

This is a sampling of the nails I pulled from the wooden lath. Notice anything funny about them? They're square. It's hard to tell from my amateur iPhone photos, but these nails aren't round. I'm not even sure they're machine-made. They might be handmade nails.

Hundreds of these little guys were all through the walls. I kept a handful as souvenirs. They're irregular, slightly different lengths, a bit rusty, and square in cross-section. I wonder who made them and how. Different times.

The Boiler Room

One water heater down, one to go.

Why would a house have two water heaters? Because they removed one.

Seriously, it used to have three water heaters: one upstairs (for the "civilian" quarters), one downstairs (for the restaurant), and a third, extra-hot, one for the restaurant dishwasher. That last one was removed before we bought the house, but the two main ones remained. In fact, they're both pretty new, having been replaced less than fives years ago.

The upstairs water heater was in the worst possible location, partially blocking a window and generally making a nuisance if itself in the laundry room. It also looked like it was plumbed in by drunken tree weasels using sticks and rocks. What a mess. It had every combination of galvanized pipe, copper pipe, flex tubing, hose cocks, and bubblegum imaginable. The proverbial plumber's nightmare. It was my least-favorite room in the house because I couldn't stand to look at the mess they'd made of it.

Today we (okay, the plumber) removed the upstairs water heater and jiggered the pipes to connect to the downstairs unit. It's a bit of a kludge, but it's temporary until we remove the second water heater, too, and plumb in the new tankless unit. That should serve the whole house and, as an added bonus, it'll sit under the crawlspace and be invisible. I love modern technology.