Plumbing that Never Was

And now to see what was going on while the paint dried.

 In the kitchen we plumbed an extension for the pot-filler by the stove. Do I have a pot-filler by the stove today? Nope. There was a lot of shopping for it (a lot ). There were hours of frustration trying to find a lead-free pot filler. I know it sounds silly to a lot of people, and plumbers, to fuss about a little tiny bits of government-approved amounts of lead. We did our best to find items that had as close to zero as possible.  It was was so hard to find this type of faucet just for my regular sinks! A pot-filler was one of those trendy things we thought was neat, but in the end it was admittedly silly because the sink was a few steps away. So we decided not to develop it any further. 

This is the sink pipes. However the hot water pipe had to be changed, because...

...it was pointing to the water heat that was going to sit here in a cabinet...

...that then was going to sit under the kitchen, but never came to be.

We thought about instant hot water in the kitchen, but the electrician mentioned that if it wasn't a gas instant water heater it would be very expensive to run on electric. So we opted for a hot water holding- tank style heater, but it eventually was eliminated from the project list for various reasons. So we re-routed the hot water pipe to the main heater, which was less than a 25 foot run away. That should have ensured that we had some kind of hot water in a timely manner! Unfortunately, it is never really hot at the kitchen faucet unless you wait quite a while. 

We never got around to returning the little water heater (which we bought in a town a hundred miles away). So I have in my mind's eye a cute little shed-roofed hut under the kitchen window that houses the little water heater and a water softener, with a 12" pipe to bring it all to the kitchen sink. Hmm maybe when the rest of the house is finished we can add that on...how hard could it be?

Painting Sunshine

 

My daughter chose a color called "Chickery Chick" for the walls of her room. No matter how gloomy  it was outdoors there was one room in the house perpetually sunshine-y. 

 It was one of those cases where the painter had the "vision" for it, and the rest of us weren't quite sure. Frankly, some of us were comparing this color to traffic-control-yellow. One thing was for sure: it is bright! I had to leave her room to go out to the snow-white primed walls just to rest my eyes! 

Now that the walls were primed, it was time to pick the paint color. We knew we wanted white with a tint of something. Wouldn't you know it, husband picked out beige. As beige as you could get, that is, without leaving white. "Shell White" won the contest. 

Snow-white, and ceiling painting tip

Yeah, it snowed. So much for the mild winter theory. 

Inside the house the rest of us- the ones who didn't use power tools-  could actually DO something: we primed all the drywall for painting. 

Disregarding the advice to put an "orange peel" texture on the wall, we opted for roller-texture, which was actually almost ZERO texture, which required a 1/4 nap roller. It's called the "slick wall" finish.

Folks, that's the "doing it the hard way" choice.

But what other choice did you expect us amateurs to make?

The ceiling was THE MOST ANNOYING project of that week. There is hardly a way to disguise painting mistakes on the ceiling. It's not like you can hang a picture there or something! You can kind of see what I am talking about in the photo above.  The 1/4 nap roller hardly holds any paint. One and a half short strokes and it's time to refill. Glopping it doesn't help. I went to YouTube, of course, for help. I bought the suggested items and tried them our. 

The Canadian guy's advice was the first to go (he made it look so effortless), then the other guy who said "get up close and personal with the ceiling and use a brush." Neck ache! Finally the Idaho guy (these aren't YT channel names BTW) had the most amazing tool: did you know they made MAMMOTH rollers?

About 3/4 into this frustrating project, my husband came along with the best solution for "slick wall" painting finish on the ceiling! First he came in with the mammoth roller and simply got the paint on there, and then I went quickly over what he just put on with a "dry" 1/4 nap roller and "ironed it flat." From that point on the job went easier and faster. 

When we were all done it was so bright in the house I had to wear sunglasses! 

 

Not Quite Ready

(Perhaps some of you are enjoying a heat wave right now-- in that case I hope the timing of these building re-cap posts cools you down!)

As we were enjoying days where the temps were in the 50s, winter suddenly looked over its shoulder and said, "Hey, I forgot Oregon!"

 

Well, a little dusting of snow doesn't hurt. 

Well okay, six inches or so for sledding. Fine. 

Remembering the roof snow avalanche in an earlier winter, I steered clear of all eves, climbing up on the side of the porch instead. 

True to their word, the drywall pros came back the first of February. The announcements were thrilling: "This room is ready to paint!" "That room is ready to paint!" 

They moved down to the first floor and started doing what they could, but it turned out that we weren't really ready for them down there. We needed to re-build some in some places, re-plumb in some places, and order a bunch of materials. With all the time it takes to tape, mud, remud, mud again (not to mention if the pros were even available to come back), not being ready could mean quite a delay in wall progress. 

We couldn't manage to sell the ol' snow car. It was too much of a lemon and my honest husband ended up talking everyone out of buying it. Eventually the Prius went up for sale instead. And yes, now you can laugh. 

I just want to put a note here about not being ready from what we learned. Get a detailed list from the contractor of what he needs to have in, be done, or see before he comes out to do his part of the job. Don't rely on your memory, write it down! If you are doing stuff, or another sub-contractor needs to do stuff, make sure you have that list and check it twice. Also, something I recently learned from a contractor: nowadays, if you are not ready for a contractor when they show up at the appointed time, you will most likely be charged a gas fee & hourly fee for all their trouble and time to drive their diesel pickup out to a non-job that day. This can occur even if you forgot to leave a key for them to get into the job; they really don't like that kind of delay. So make sure you think ahead!