Month: October 2008

Today we got our well waited for toilet, it is a Kohler Kingston which is a wall hung toilet without a tank, it requires a flushometer. I got a Sloan royal sensor operated flushometer for it from eBay. I reinforced the wall studs with 23/32″ OSB, and as you can see the carrier is too big to fit inside one wall, it required two walls spaced apart to fit everything inside. I hooked it to a 1″ copper line and have had some pressure drop during high flow when flushing, I think I’m going to put a second pressure tank behind it to help, but it’s working good enough for now.

The east side of the partition wall has drywall attached to it and now has a coat of mud and tape on it.

Today I built a partition wall that will separate the garage from the living area. It is 18′ tall and very heavy. I lifted it halfway with the scaffold winch and then I lag bolted a 2 X 10 plate on the west wall that I used to pull it the rest of the way with some pulleys and rope. It took an hour but it’s in place now. I had to build it in three sections.

Today we got our attic insulated, Our friend Wayne told us that it wasn’t worth it to blow this stuff yourself, just get a guy to come and do it. Well we’ve done just about everything ourselves so far, but we decided it would be too much hassle to do ourselves. The price for these guys was <$200 more than the cost of renting the equipment and hauling the product ourselves. We used “Above All Roofing and Insulation”, to do this job and they were great. I actually wasn’t home at the time but Wanda said they came in, did the work, cleaned up afterwards and were really friendly and straight foreword, plus they were one of the few companies that called us back within a few hours. I think they are the guys to use.

Wanda and I have been staying at our house for the last month, and tonight is the first night we are staying in the city, This gives me a chance to update the website. I’ve decided to stay here so that I can get an early start to get to see a doctor, I was stung by a wasp on my left foot and then the same day I walked through a ditch that was too deep for my boots to handle, this led to me being wet, and getting my foot infected, it doesn’t really hurt but it’s getting large and it has many small red dots showing on the surface.  I’ve also broken my camera phone, so no more pictures from it, they will all have to be from Wanda’s camera from now until January when my contract is up.

I’m about to go to bed so I’m going to just dump some pictures on here and I may add a few words at a later date.

Wanda found some mushrooms in the ditch, they’re only supposed to grow in spring but there they were, so she cooked them and we ate them, Wanda loved them, I thought they tasted a bit like soap.  My Dad came over and we built this wall together and stood the floor joists above it.

If you believe that the small circles in pictures are ghosts we sure have a lot of them in all our pictures, I think we might have some dust between the lenses.

I forget what Wanda cooked but I do remember that welding gloves can be used in the kitchen.  Shown below is the drywall that was put above the spare bedroom, the spot without drywall is where the partition wall will be.

Here I’m installing the in floor heat, the soldering was easy, the worst part was putting the pex into the fittings, it wanted to cut the o-rings, and they weren’t the good ones used in hydraulics, they nicked really easy. The trick was to chamfer the inside of the pex and lick it for lubrication, well it worked, and no leaks except at the 1 1/4″ fittings, I have to take them apart and put more Teflon tape and pipe dope on them.  We started building the master bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room.

The plumbing for the heat is done and looks good, I put a thermostatic mixing valve it mix the floor water to the correct temperature, it will maintain a constant temp. even when the input temperatures change. The two pipes that go nowhere are there if I want to run an outdoor wood boiler, I will run the coolant through a heat exchanger mounted under these pipes and the wood fire will heat the house until it burns out and the electric boiler will start up.  Bleeding the air out was easy, and it didn’t take too much coolant either, I used 25 liters of coolant and 80 Liters of water.

Wanda made some pickles, and I saw a good day after a night of rain.