Friday night, my friend Garth came over to help me frame up the fireplace in the basement. I know that I said that the framing was done but I forgot about the fireplace. We basically just made a huge frame in the corner with a shelf on top. I’ll sheet rock it in and use it to house the soon to be purchased big-screen TV and home theater speakers.
After we finished with the fireplace, Garth decided to help me frame around some pipes in the bathroom. We got everything in cut and he started nailing the boards in place when all of a sudden he hit a water line three times with the nail gun. I immediately ran over to the water main and turned it off. It was about midnight so any repairs were going to have to be done the next day.
As I started looking at the situation, I realized that I would need to rent some tools to repair the damaged line. I could go buy them but I don’t plan on ever using them again so spending $200 on tools that would be used once seemed like a waste. It’s better to spend $20 to rent them. Since I had to rent tools for the repair, I decided that it would be best to just do all of the plumbing for the bathroom at once so that I wouldn’t have to pay the rental fee twice. That is how my Saturday was spent.
What appeared on the surface to be an easy job turned into an all-day ordeal. All that I needed to do was make five cuts in existing lines and splice new lines into them. It shouldn’t have taken very long but it seemed like one thing after another went wrong. I actually had to rip out some of the framing because the crimpers were not able to reach the pipes. Finally, after five hours of bending in weird directions while standing on a ladder, it was done.
The bathroom and laundry room are now completely plumbed and I managed do it without causing any problems to existing water lines or having any leaks once the water was turned back on. I also managed to avoid showing any sort of plumber’s crack which I’m sure made those around me happy.
Next up: electrical.
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