01st Sep 2008
All in the family
My uncle from the north drove down to help out me and my dad for a weekend of renos. He brought with him a chainsaw, butane torches and a grinder, and I was ordered to have some Smirnoff vodka available upon his arrival.
As soon as they got going in a discussion of P-traps and metal studs, I knew was going to be in the unusual position of being completely superfluous to the job. My dad had a buddy.
They got down to business on Friday – the goal was to:
- replace all of the cast iron sewer stack from the basement up to the vent in the roof with PVC
- open up a nook in the bathroom for the new sink
- put in the new plumbing for the sink
- possibly replace the toilet
- cut down 2 trees in the back yard.
After uncle put on his “work overalls”, they started up in the crawlspace in the guest bedroom. I was instructed to get a pail of water and remove the battery from the smoke alarm. They shut the door so I’m not really sure what they were doing in there – but I had the cat and the phone at the ready in case I needed to vacate to the street and call 911. I think it was shortly after that that I was off for the 2nd Home Depot run of the weekend – short-run 90 degree elbows and a copper-to-PVD adapter and sealant for the roof and whatnot.
Only they didn’t have the short-run elbows, and the sealant was white for some reason instead of black, so I ended up being not so helpful in the fetching department, but at least the house was not on fire when I got back. I have learned that cutting old cast iron sewer stack is not, in fact, a very nice thing to do. Iron dust flies everywhere, and stains things orange, such as your bathtub or your uncle. And the smell? Well, think burnt metal and old poop. Yeah – really pleasant.
I had to go out again to get the short-run elbows, and a different adapter, so this time I drove over to the real Home Hardware by my old house (as opposed to the yuppie Home Hardware up the street, where roughly 50% of the total floorspace is taken up by designer bathroom displays and they don’t even know what a metal sawsall blade looks like). Anyway, dude hooked me up with the right stuff and I returned redeemed and triumphant in my fetching abilities.
By the time I got back, they were ready for the next phase which included removing the remaining tiles on the toilet side of the wall, cutting into the plaster and then freeing the big stack and lowering it into the basement. Since I hadn’t done much in the way of demolition yet, I thought I’d get in there and work on tile removal. Safety first, so I even gave up my safety sandals in favour of running shoes, but I retained the safety shorts. As a result, shards of tile attacked my legs though I didn’t feel it. When I saw that I was in fact bleeding from several locations, I lost my concentration and pinched the meat of my hand between the hammer and the chisel, resulting in a blood blister. All the blood was turning me off of further effort in that area.
Nonetheless, the tiles were vanquished and the wall was removed and we were ready for the next phase. Did I mention that cast iron is heavy? My father rigged up some moving ropes around a knuckle on the trunk in the wall, and the idea was that uncle would chop off the main piece in the basement while my father and I held up about 300 pounds of the straight run in the wall and then we would gently lower it down to the basement. We braced ourselves, I assumed the tug-of-war stance and braced against the wall for further support.
When the last clamp was free, we got ready for a dropping dead weight, but nothing happened. It was absolutely stuck in the wall. Now, this was a tricky situation, since if we freed the jam upstairs and no one was holding it and/or ready downstairs, there was the potential for the whole thing to got crashing to the basement floor and possibly take out my furnace and the gas line. So there I was holding “up” the 300 pounds while my father swore at the wall and starting hacking at the wood braces with the sawsall and my uncle stood in the basement waiting to “catch” whatever might come crashing down.
But even with the wood braces gone, the thing was stuck. In the end this was a good thing as it allowed us to ease it slowing through the opening. By this point I was in the basement holding up the other part with a stick. Safety first.
After my uncle came down to help with the rest of the removal, we ended up with a whole pile of cast iron on my neighbour’s lawn. Phase 1 complete!
Next they wanted to open up the wall facing the sideroom, where we were going to put the sink. I was outside working on the lawn at this point, since we couldn’t fit all 3 of us in the bathroom, and since I was now festooned with bandaids from the tile incident, when I heard a bit of a yell and a bang. The wall had decided to let go this mortal coil, but my uncle was thoughtful enough to catch it with his arm and his head–which, if you know him, meant that he was alright but the wall was toast. Blood drawn for the second time that day (just a minor scratch).
After that, work went pretty quickly on the PVC (my uncle) and on the metal studs for the alcove (my father). They got the phlange in for the toilet and capped off some pipes so that we could have water for the evening.
There was a soldering station in the garage, and a table saw station in the driveway, and before we knew it, there was framing and rough-ins and lots of good stuff, until my father rapped his knuckle on some pipe and ripped it open. And yes, there was blood.
Trip #2 to the pharmacy: bandages and polysporin.
Trip #3 to the Home Depot: a new toilet, insulation, more pipe, dry vac bags, taps for the sink (at a cost of almost twice as much as I paid for the sink itself).
On the third day, things were really shaping up – the walls were up and the rough-ins done. Needing a break from the bathroom, the boys decided it was time to take down the trees. Each one was only about 30 feet, so my uncle went up on the ladder to notch the first one and we were getting ready to “take ‘er down” when neighbour P came running over in his Sunday suit with a special rope to help steady the top when it came off. I was mightily impressed he’d waited this long to try to get involved with the work. He did his best to get my uncle to a boil by trying to give instructions on how best to fell the tree, though.
Anyway, the ladder was up on the other side of the tree for the cut, and my neighbour and my dad were holding the rope. My uncle started the chainsaw and then climbed the ladder, only the ladder decided now would be a good time to go sideways, so here I am running across the yard not sure if I’m going to catch the ladder, a chainsaw or my uncle. Got there in time to rebalance the ladder and my uncle got the tree down very quickly (though he was still having palipations by the time he was back on the ground).
On the next tree, the boys (now including my neighbour) decided not to top the tree, and to try to take it down whole. But once it was notched, it got hung up on my other big tree, so uncle was chopping out lengths at the bottom while we used the ropes to keep it upright – it was pretty cool actually. It kept landing upright as it got shorter, until it wasn’t upright and went sideways onto the neighbour’s garage. Oopsie. No damage, thankfully, but had it gone into his garden, I think I would have been sued.
Back on the plumbing after some tree clean-up, they brought in the sink and worked on the trap and it looked fabulous… until we turned on the water. Damn thing was leaking like a levee in a hurricane and of course it was too late now to get another tailpipe (and quite frankly, I didn’t want my father working on it at that point since he was now calling my bathroom the mf-ing bathroom). We decided I could live another few weeks without a bathroom sink and turned our attentions to the toilet. It went in just fine and boy is it a flusher! It’s this little tank, but the g-force on that puppy is impressive.
I finally got to take my shower while the boys were half asleep on the couch (at around 8pm), when I noticed some water on the floor – the feed to the tank was leaking :) It was old, and needed to be replaced but we thought we could away with it for a while and apparently that was a no. So, a few stumbles in the dark to the truck for supplies, and there they were making a new one and soldering it in place before they crashed for good at 9pm.