Tuesday started with a flurry of chaos. There was the arrival of the plumbers and the electrician, along with the General contractor and his assistant. As things were getting very frenetic, the big truck with the cabinets arrived just to make it worse. There was really no good spot for the cabinets. Lots of very large and heavy boxes, and have I mentioned that this is a small house. The garage seemed like the best place, but it was packed full of our old kitchen cabinets and appliances. The next logical place was the yard, but Cara vetoed that, and she wasn’t even there. So the garage had to do. With some clever packing in, and the complete denial of our access to the fridge which still has stuff in it, everything fit in, although there was some stacking, and lots of cramming. As this was all going on, I said ‘I’m out!’ and headed to class.
As I left, everybody was working in the few square feet of the kitchen and laundry room. Although by my return 2 hours later, the plumbers were taking turns slithering underneath the house, and the electrician was climbing alternately through the attic and under the house.
The plumber’s task for the day was the installation of a tankless water heater in the place where the old one was. I had initially been under the impression that it was a direct replacement. Pull the old one out, re-route the piping already there, and put the new one on. Unfortunately I was wrong. Instead they had to run completely new and larger gas lines, and install a completely new chimney. Our old one was a shared exhaust system for the furnace, water heater and vent hoot for the stove, and to top it off, it is an asbestos tube. They were not very keen on working with the asbestos, so they just routed a new one up through the attic and roof. Since they were already under the house, the also relocated the gas line for the stove to come up and out of the new wall where the door was, and also moved the gas line for the water heater so as to be against the wall. That did quite a number to free up floor space under the new water heater, and so now we have to determine what we can store in that position. We are thinking recycle bin.
So it was all rather chaotic, but on that one day, we had a new water heater fully functional, many new outlets, although they were wired and didn’t have their plugs or switches in them. Additionally, this day saw the demise of the chandelier. The hideous, god forsaken chandelier. Gone. But there was something that smelled funny about the whole ordeal….
That evening we surveyed the work, and noticed a strange smell. It almost smelled like gas, but lacked the utter nastiness of the straight natural gas smell. I thought it may just be the water heater getting broken in, and the chemicals that are used in the production process burning off in its first bit of usage. The following morning the smell had not dissipated and when Butch arrived, he decided he would check the fittings he could see for gas leaks. A little trick if you are ever confronted with this situation. It is something we do in the military, and it is done by engineers to check for leaks on different systems. Take some soapy water in a spray bottle, or even some cleaning spray, and spray it on the joints or any place where you think there may be a leak. If there is, it will bubble up and show you exactly where it is leaking. We spent about 15 minutes going over every fitting we could see, but there weren’t any leaks.
At this point I headed off for school, only to get a call in the middle of a class saying that they discovered that the furnace’s pilot light had gone out when they cut the gas the day before, and it doesn’t have an automatic relight mechanism. And apparently it was kicking the plumber’s ass trying to relight it. He spent about 2 hours fighting with it, and only got it lit after I got home.
While all of this was going on, the house had its first inspection. Since we are trying to do everything on the up and up, we had a permit taken out, which requires inspections by the city. This makes it all legal, but also provides an avenue for more expenses and more time wasted fixing piddly stuff that the inspector decides needs to be fixed. Luckily he was happy and there wasn’t a whole lot that needed to be done. The lighting, which is a point of contention in California, ended up being perfectly satisfactory. The only real big thing to do wasn’t kitchen related at all. It was a pressure relief valve on the side of the house that needed a check valve and a secondary relief valve installed. So I got my shovel out, and got to digging. 3 feet later I reached the pipe, and that was fixed later.
By the end of day 3, the cabinets were about to start going in. The first shims had been put on the floor, and two cabinets were in place. Or they would have been, had I not asked them to be moved for painting. When Cara got home from work we went to work on the kitchen, running a bead of latex caulk over all of the gaps in the new walls put up, or the old wall panels put back up, and then Cara ran the roller over them with a fresh layer of our terra cotta paint. Everything’s coming together very well.
No comments:
Post a Comment