We had a great week, a bit hard on the body, but great. The weather was wonderful, fifty-something degrees and dry. Perfect weather for climbing through the floor joists and putting the plumbing system in for our Farmhouse build. No mud to speak of is always good news. We spent the week installing the plumbing system under the floorboards of the new Farmhouse.
Plumbing is like electricity in some ways. The building codes are archaic, hard to read, and there isn't much you can do to find information easily. And like electrical circuits you don't know if it works until you turn it on. We looked at a ton of YouTube videos, and did dozens of Google searches to find pertinent information. Eventually we got enough knowledge together to buy parts.
The County man who came out last week seemed concerned about our plan to use copper pipe everywhere. He worried over the probability of leaks developing immediately from bad welds. But copper has always be my go to material because it is easily worked and there are few tools required. But when the Building Inspector voiced his concerns I looked around for possible better stuff. We found PEX.
PEX piping is wonderful stuff. Pipe is inexpensive and the fittings are fairly inexpensive. Tools are a pipe cutter and a clamping tool with an indicator to tell you when you have the clamp tight enough. You can buy the stuff in three colors: red, white, and blue, so color coding hot and cold sides make mistakes much harder to make. All said and done, the PEX we put in cost half as much as copper and went together three times faster, all with nearly no chance of failure. The waste pipes were a different story.
There is a whole lot of stuff I didn't know about the simple task of piping the waste out from under a house. The need for venting the drains was a new experience. Luckily for us there are a lot of videos and images of the work out there, so cobbling a plan together only took a week or so. Figuring out the size of pipe to use was a matter of picking through the building code, but this only took a few days to find.Figuring out how to make the pipes slope downward at the right angles took a few days and three attempts. Until it is inspected we won't know if we got it right, but it looks good. Plumbing is hard to conceptualize and do, but it is also very hard on the body too.
The week of climbing around the floor joists took a hefty toll on us both. It is hard work just moving around in the space and each move was a chance to bang yourself up. Ann sustained a fairly nasty set of bruises on everything from the waist down . She will be healing up for a few weeks.
On Monday we'll get inspected, the sub-floor framing and plumbing. So the last thing we did after the plumbing was to cut a hatch in the sub-floor frame so that we can get under the house once finished. Not a big job, but figuring out where to put the hatch was a bit of a thought experiment. We eventually settled on the hallway because nearly all of the house where the pipes are is easily accessible there. Coincidentally the attic access is right above the crawlspace access. I like symmetry.
Once we pass the inspection we can begin putting down floor boards and putting up walls. the next flight of inspection will come once the roof trusses are up and wiring in. It will look like a house. The next bit is fun. Progress is being made every day. The coming of Spring, and its good weather will only make things easier.
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