Paradise update...

Paradise update...  It's an overcast morning in Paradise.  Here's a few photos of from around our yard:

View to the NE, with sheep

Our one and only lilac (there will be more!)

It's a decorative onion of some kind

From our front yard, looking NE

We had a lot of progress on our remodeling this week. Nearly all the old flooring has been removed – I'm now walking around the house on the chipboard sub-floors, watching carefully for sharp nails and staples.  So far, I haven't stepped on any :)

There are some old flooring removal challenges in the kitchen, mainly because the cabinetry was installed on top of the old flooring.  This means that virtually every appliance has to be removed in order to access that flooring, and there are a lot of appliances in this kitchen.  Our garage now looks like an appliance graveyard, and there are still more that need to be removed.  The remaining ones are the hard ones, too: the (very large) gas range and the (gigantic) refrigerator.  Once all the appliances are removed, the old flooring has to be carefully sawed out.  This is done with a very special saw, the likes of which I'd never seen before: a “toe-kick saw”.  Our flooring contractor burned up his saw while removing some of our flooring; now he's waiting the arrival of a new one.  Watching this saw in action is pretty amazing – it neatly cuts the old flooring perfectly flush to a cabinet, without dinging the cabinet at all.

I've mentioned before that we're gutting the master bathroom and completely rearranging the location of everything in it.  The main motivation was to get rid of the very large, jetted tub and to create a large shower with the freed-up space.  The photos below show the current state of affairs.  All the old bathroom fixtures have been completely removed.  Yesterday, the plumbing for the new bathroom fixtures was completed (a two day job).  Some photos:

New shower valves

New shower drain

New sewer lines

New sink roughed-in

Plumbing has changed a lot since I last tried my hand at it!  All the new pipe being installed in our house is PEX (the semi-transparent pipes visible in the photos of the shower valves and roughed-in sink).  This was a completely new material to me (see the link for more information).  Up here, at least, it's now the standard for both new construction and remodeling, and for replacing copper pipes.  It has several advantages over copper: it's bendable (though with fairly large radii), it's forgiving of freezes (there's some give to the plastic), and the fastening technology is very simple and practically foolproof: crimped clamps over molded connectors.  The productivity of the plumbers using PEX is really something to see – easily 3 or 4 times as much finished work per hour.

The sewer plumbing turned out to be the big challenge for the remodel, specifically moving the toilet's 3-inch line about 5 feet diagonally across the room.  This took some creative routing and a little math on the part of the plumber.  The routing had to make allowance for two things: the 3 inch holes in the joists had to be more than 3 feet from any joist support, and the line had to be on a slope of at least 1/8" per foot.  To accomplish both, he ended up running the line in a "C" shaped route.

The roughed-in sinks had a number of features new to me.  The piece of galvanized steel with holes in it is purpose-built for rough-ins.  It has holes to accommodate hard plastic “grommets” to protect the softer PEX tubing from abrasion.  Over the sewer pipe in the photo, where it runs through a stud, you can see a metal plate.  This is to prevent the drywall installers from screwing through the pipe accidentally.  The plumber hammered on a couple dozen of these over every stud or joist penetration.

Next up: the electrician and the heating guy, to install outlets, switches, lights, fans, and heating ducts.  They should both be done by the middle of next week.  Then it's time for the tile folks to come in and start covering all this mess up!