In the spring I’ll start with a few seasonal maintenance items and then focus on electrical wiring so I can then insulate the walls. Assuming I get at least that much done in 2023, I can keep the house open in the winter even with just a space heater. Hopefully, though, I’ll be able to get some of the radiant floor heating installed as well.

Here is the detail view of the final plumbing install:

One interesting note – the clear line on the left is a condensate drain. The installation instructions didn’t specify the diameter of this drain, and when I called Rheem, they could not confirm this, either. I had to buy several sizes, install the right one, and return the others. Seems like an odd oversight, but all set now!

The other important component of this install was the venting system. This takes in fresh, outdoor air and exhausts heated air from the system back outdoors. The photo below shows the completed venting on the exterior wall with a Rheem integrated vent cover system. Because I installed the unit on an exterior wall, this was the best option and is also a really neat and clean termination for the ventilation.

Next up, wall framing and electrical runs for this system as well as the washer and dryer system to be placed next to this in the mud room.

This week I focused on getting the tankless hot water heater installed. I’m doing the basic install which includes the plumbing, venting, and mounting. When I complete this portion, then my gas provider will come out to inspect the work and install the gas hookup to complete the installation. Here’s what it looks like at this stage:

What’s missing at the moment?

• Exhaust venting from the top of the unit (needed to order parts for this)
• Condensate drain (same as above)
• Relief valve off the hot water line (part was missing and has been shipped)
• Electrical

I should get all the missing parts by the time I’m ready to go up again in two weeks, so other than the electrical, I should finish with less than another full day of effort.

If you follow the hot water line down from the unit, you’ll see a TEE connector with nothing connected to the right – that’s where the relief valve will go once it arrives. Then it, and the condensate drain, will go down through the floor into the crawl space and out into the yard for drainage.

As far as the electrical, I will be running three circuits to this location – one for the water heater, and one each for the washer and dryer that will be stacked to the right of this sometime in the future.

It feels nice to be making some progress on the interior after lots of previous delays and the final completion of the exterior last fall!

In addition to the three-stage system, I also installed a “prefilter” that works a bit like a Dyson vacuum. The prefilter spins the water and pulls out larger sediment so it doesn’t clog the filters too quickly. And it has a flushing valve to remove the captured sediment periodically. This will add to the life of the filters by a lot – especially since my well pulls a lot of sediment.

Unfortunately, the prefilter is defective and needs to be replaced. I called the manufacturer and they were super helpful, but after troubleshooting, they said it needed to be replaced and will be shipping me a new one. While I’m not happy to have to reinstall this, at least with PEX it’s relatively easy – if I had soldered this I’d be really ticked off!

So, for now, I’m bypassing the new filter system and things are running as before. This is fine because, for now, I only have a garden hose and a toilet with running water. And, all the work I put in for the install remains, so replacing the prefilter should be about an hour or so, and then I should be all set.

In fact, I “cleaned up” the rough plumbing in the process so everything is neat, and tacked to the ceiling and walls of the crawl space. I even ran a line for a new spigot on the side of the house so that’s ready when I want to add it. So all this work paid off and I should have the tankless heater and/or replacement prefilter for next week’s effort.

The first project to commence is plumbing with the following sequential steps:

1. Rough plumbing for first bathroom vanity
2. Mount and plumb tankless hot water heater
3. Have gas company complete water heater install and turn gas back on
4. Install first bathroom vanity and finally have running cold AND hot water
5. Install radiant floor PEX in the back half of the house
6. Install shower pan in the first bathroom

I’ve completed the first task and here’s the manifold with the new lines installed:

And here’s the rough plumbing for the vanity in the bathroom:

It’s pretty simple, really, and wasn’t even that hard of a project. Except that getting under the house in precisely the right location to complete this was really tricky. I had to shimmy in a crawl space that is less than 18″ and I found some broken glass in that area just to make it more of a challenge. I spent some time cleaning it out to be sure I wouldn’t ultimately shimmy across the glass and I’ll need to do a little more of that when I get to connecting the shower plumbing down the road.

It feels good to get even a small project completed in this sequence and hopefully I’ll be getting more done in the summer weeks.

First up I had to take care of a plumbing infrastructure item because there was an immediate issue. When the contractor put in the new plumbing drain to the septic, they put in a temporary vent stack to vent sewer gasses. Here’s what that looked like:

This was put here as a temporary solution because I’d ultimately like to run this vent up an inside wall and through the roof. However, that wall doesn’t yet exist, so we needed a temporary solution. And since it was temporary, they just used the leftover materials they had, resulting in a open vent right under a window. With that window open, sewer gas came back into the house. Yuck!

Since it will be awhile before the interior wall is framed and I might leave this in the current location anyway, I completed a potential permanent solution. And since the materials cost less than $20 and it took me about an hour, no big deal if I remove it later. Here’s the final vent stack:

It’s worth noting that this assures the vent is above the roof edge and also adds a 90° bend to the top of the vent to assure that rainwater doesn’t enter into the system.

Next up, “Greenboard”

The next project was to put in a couple of pieces of Greenboard, which is effectively water resistant drywall. This is used in damp locations like bathrooms to assure that the drywall doesn’t grow mold and/or rot. It is not waterproof and isn’t designed for use in full wet locations like showers and tubs – those will get cementboard.

The first piece of Greenboard was needed behind the existing toilet in the new bathroom. I wanted to get this installed sooner than later because the vanity we’re installing in that bathroom is wall-mounted and this assures that I’ve got the right clearance needed when installing that. And I’d like to install that soon so I can start having some running water! I put a quick shelf in here using some scrap wood as well.

The second piece is for the mudroom where the plumbing manifold was installed and the tankless hot water heater will be mounted later. This is on an exterior wall, so I needed to put in the fiberglass insulation as well to complete this wall section. Thankfully, there isn’t any electrical being run in this section, so closing up this wall now makes sense.

And now for some aesthetic efforts – exterior paint!

I also took the time to get started on the exterior paint. This will be a project that takes multiple days, and needs to get done sooner than later to assure all the building materials are protected from the weather. I also wanted to get a section complete to show Tracy the colors we selected so we can make any adjustments before doing the entire house. Here’s that section:

This section of the screened porch is the color combination that we’re envisioning. With the siding painted in a dark-ish gray and the trim in a black tone, it gives the house a modern aesthetic while still fitting in nicely with the country style of a mountain house. The window on the left has a second color that we were considering but I think we’ve already decided against it. That lighter color is nice, but the darker trim gives a more modern look that we think is more appealing in modern times.

Other Projects?

Also this week I handled a few smaller projects. First, the exterior door inside the screened porch above is new, and we decided to change the swing direction. For this reason I needed to take about an hour to relocate the wiring and light switch for the ceiling fan on the porch and sconce lighting to be installed later.

Related to that new door, I needed to replace the door hardware with the keyed locks that I already had on the previous door.

I also had to deal with some “smart home” setup. Three of the switches in the house right now are Wemo smart switches that I took from my NYC apartment. In the apartment I’ve mostly moved to Lutron instead as they match current aesthetics and they are way more reliable. And since Wemo recently changed their setup, I couldn’t get these online without a cellular signal (which I do not have at the house!) A Wemo rep took me patiently through a workaround that took about an hour, but now that it’s complete, I should be able to add others easily in the future.

I also spent a little time removing the remains of two honey locust trees on the property. These trees grow extremely large and threatening thorns, so I really don’t want to deal with these. I’ve got them down to the stumps, but unless I uproot or kill the rest, they will keep growing back. So I have to tend to these one way or another before they mature and the thorns get seriously dangerous.

That’s all for a few weeks – going to enjoy the rest of August by hiking and swimming more while up at the house!

After doing a lot of research, I am opting for PEX plumbing because it’s relatively inexpensive and VERY easy to do on my own. PEX is super forgiving because it’s flexible, has easy connections, and has a good freeze tolerance since it can expand before cracking. So I bought the needed tool for Pro Crimps, a bunch of materials, and headed off to the house to get started.

The first thing I needed to do was connect a 3/4″ PEX “mainline” from the pressure tank in the crawl space. This was the hardest step because I had to remove an old adapter that was rusted onto the pressure tank and I needed to be careful not to break anything in the process. Below is the result of this effort. The white pipe is the new mainline and the garden hose is simply on the tank pressure release valve.

The mainline is piped into the house where there is a manifold (more on that in a moment) but from under the house it is also split into a couple of other sections to feed garden hose spigots outside the house. One is already installed, and two others will be added later, so I simply added a branch with a (closed) valve on it for now.

There’s one branch to the left of the coil of blue (cold water) PEX and another just to the right. Then, at the far right, there are two lines feeding into the house. The one on the right is entering the manifold to feed all the cold water lines and the one on the left will go to the new tankless hot water heater which will be installed soon.

Let’s talk about this manifold for a moment:

This is really where the magic happens, and a huge advantage of PEX. Basically, the right side is cold water, the left will be hot, and each valve leads to a “home run” water line. Home Runs are lines that go from the manifold directly to their final fixtures. Because PEX is cheap, and in my case the longest home run is like 15-ft, you can do more of these and it makes managing the system really easy. This manifold is mounted in the mudroom behind an exterior door so there’s super easy access to turn on/off any line at any time.

The white line on the left ends at a valve for now, but will go to the tankless hot water heater, also mounted behind that door. The one blue line on the right is a 1/2″ home run for the toilets (one for now, one to be added later.) Connecting this first toilet was the second hardest task because the crawl space under there is really small and I had to shimmy in the dirt to get access. Here are the toilet line and home run before I made the connection:

That photo doesn’t quite convey how tight it was to work in there, but it was tight! I got it done, though – and after forgetting to take a photo said there was no way I was shimmying back under there just for a photo!

Here’s the toilet connection inside the house:

The blue line might be offensive, but it’s hidden behind the toilet and this photo is from the next room since there are no walls right now. LOL

Over the winter, the little bit of copper plumbing that remained was effectively destroyed – there were pinhole leaks everywhere even though the water was (mostly) drained. This wasn’t a surprise, and I simply ran garden hoses directly to the sink, shower, and toilet, for temporary use until I put in the new plumbing.

However, what I didn’t account for was the -17F temps reached during an atypical cold spell and the freeze/thaw of the water in the toilet bowl. I thought it was emptied, but I can’t be sure, because the porcelain shell cracked rendering the toiled useless. Pictured above is the new toilet I installed for current use – and to be used in one of the new bathrooms when I get to that point.

These are the remains of the old toilet. As I tried to remove it, the rest of the porcelain began disintegrating in my hands, so I removed it piece by piece.

Anyway, this was a full day job (including shopping and buying the new toilet) that I wish I didn’t have to do, but now it’s done.

The main garden hose comes out to the back of the house and attaches to a splitter with two valves. This serves two purposes. First, this allows me to go from here right to the washing machine which is up and to the left of this photo. Second, this allows the washing machine to be isolated since that thing may die at any minute! The hose with the blue collar goes back under the house to feed the existing bathroom plumbing.

In the existing bathroom copper, wherever there was a leak, I bypassed it with heater hose as I was taught earlier by my neighbor. Heater hose and a few clamps makes for a terrific and flexible connection, so it’s also good for getting around obstacles. Here, the functioning copper pipe feed was on one side of this drain and the toilet tank feed on the other. Once these connections were completed, I had running water in the bathroom again. (Albeit cold water ONLY, but something!)

When I turned on the pump, and slowly opened the various valves, I didn’t hear anything leaking – so that was a win! The toilet tank was filling and the sink was running, so that was great.

But when I turned on the shower, water was shooting out the back of the pipe. In the photo here, I’ve added notations to show my hack for bypassing a busted faucet to get a working shower:

A) The usual heater hose hack, only this time with a garden hose adapter on the top end.

B) Garden hose (Why garden hose? Because the only valve I had on hand was…)

C) A garden hose valve

D) Heater hose hack like “A” but in reverse

So, there you have it – a “functional” bathroom with no soldering. Cold water only (which, for the shower, is ICY COLD!) but it’s something. And having a toilet and sink is pretty useful.

The rest of the project is now up to me, and requires a few minor, and a few major, steps. First, I put soil around the pipe to assure that no shifting drainage stone could puncture the water pipe. Then I placed a cut PVC section over the pipe to create a small air pocket for insulation and, also, to protect the pipe from punctures. Then I added more drainage stone and smaller particulate over the PVC raising the level up a bit further. Finally I’ll put back in the dirt/soil/rocks that were shoveled out to begin the project, but as there was a bit of a ditch here already, that won’t completely fill the hole – and now with a proper cap, I will raise this mostly up to grade.

As far as the well is concerned, that should do it for now. The pressure switch and tank ma need some attention, but this is relatively minor.

Plumbing, and actually functional running water, is another story entirely. When we turned on the pump, the plumbing was more like a sprinkler due to all the new leaks that came up over the summer. This was pretty much expected, so we cut off the existing plumbing and added a new spigot where I can run water from the tank to various needs through a few temporary hacks. More on those when I next get to work on this, but at least the big project is complete!

From an infrastructure point of view, I’ve now got brand new or updated:

1. Septic
2. Electrical
3. Well Water

Framing and new plumbing are next and the framing project is probably the single largest project before anything else can be done.