Here is the long and
short of it: Since our last post, we have been working on passing rough
inspections: electric, plumbing, fire and building. We need to pass the
first three and then we can schedule the building inspection. As of this
post, we have passed two of three (electric and fire). If you are
the one subscriber who has actually paid attention to detail, the following won't be very surprising to you. I am very confident and
proficient when it comes to electric. Plumbing... not so
much. We have won over the inspector and he is on our side; though he
gave us an amazing backhanded compliment... "I give you so much credit. This is the best homeowner plumbing job I have ever seen in my 25 years as an
inspector... in which I really truly believe it was done by the
homeowner." Thank you, I think? :)
Since inspections take
time to schedule we have stayed busy on other projects. The biggest of
them all is the basement floor. We want to have a finished basement for a
few reasons: 1) Radon- We are in the radon capital of the world. I
asked the inspector if he was going to do a radon test. His response was
"Yes, I will do it right now (two second pause). Test complete....your radon
level is very high; no charge for that." 2) Moisture control- We
don't want a damp musty basement. 3) Playroom and storage- It is a large
space and will work well for a play room for our pretend future children.
The issue with the
basement is the floor to ceiling height. The original height with the
dirt/coal/shale floor was 6' as you can see from the picture below. (I am
6'2")
It took the entire month
of March, a jackhammer, and a lot of workers/helpers to remove 16" of dirt
and shale using spackle buckets to carry outside. The goal is to have a
finished concrete floor with a ceiling height of 6'6". There will be
10 inches of new material: 4" of stone, 2" XPS insulation foam board,
vapor barrier, and 4' of concrete with re-bar and radiant heat.
As you can see, we are
almost done digging. It wasn't fun. The ground is pure shale.
It is like digging out a mountain. We had to jackhammer the shale,
next pick ax it, then shovel it into spackle buckets before carrying them out
to the front yard.
You can see the original
floor height and the layers of shale. We were surprised that we didn't find
any dinosaur fossils :).
We dumped the 4000+
spackle buckets out front where the yard sloped down. Later, we will grade
it and cover it with top soil. This was an unanticipated perk because we
intend to build a deck on the entire front of the house and now the slope after
the deck will be much more gradual.
A close-up of the pile.
This is what we dug out. You can imagine how hard it was. As
my uncle says, "some people grow crops but in Northern Jersey, we grow rocks!"
Once we finish digging
this weekend, we will dig footings for lolly columns that will reinforce the
first floor beams which are 200+ years old. We spoke to the inspector and
he will allow 16" sono tube footings, only 1' deep, because the entire
basement is basically one giant footing! Then, we will bring all of the
stone that we had delivered (above) into the basement. Once we have a
level 4" layer, we will rent a gas powered tamper and level/tamp the entire
floor. Hopefully our next post will show and describe the next steps!
Now, on to our failed
plumbing inspection! There were a handful of minor issues to be corrected
and a few major issues. The first is pictured below. We thought we
did an outstanding job fitting a 2" trap (almost everyone reading this has a 1 1/2" trap for their shower or tub) under the guest bathtub above the kitchen ceiling. Then we were educated by the plumbing
inspector... the difference between a P trap (legal) and an S trap (illegal).
We originally installed an S trap which is pictured below. After learning why a S trap is illegal- it makes sense. The end of the sideways "S"
is close to the height of the drain. This could cause the trap to siphon
due to an air lock and then there will not be any water remaining in the trap
after use. This will make the trap useless and septic gases could seep up
through the tub drain.
The next major change
was capping off the dry well pipe and tying everything into the main 3" septic
drain. Wikipedia: A dry well is an underground structure that disposes of unwanted water, most commonly stormwater runoff, by dissipating it into the ground, where it merges with the local groundwater. Wow that was easy, haha. Dry wells are now illegal. The purpose was to only run sewage into the septic and have everything else go to the dry well. The dry well is now capped (top right of the pic below). A new 3" Y tie-in was installed to drain every fixture to the main and bypass the dry well. In a previous post, we lectured about the physics of plumbing and
venting. It turns out that we were operating on old science. The
plumbing code has changed in the past few years due to increased water efficiency. This works in our favor, but had we know this (we consulted with a
licensed old timer plumber and they did not know about the changes), we would
have done many things differently. We
(under advisement) used all 2" and 3" pipe for drains and vents.
We don't regret it since more is still better in this case, but if we had used 1 1/2
the install would have been much easier!
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The next issue was that the building inspector felt that the 2" drain pipe that we drilled through the new support beam (that we put up voluntarily...don’t get me started) compromised the integrity. So we cut everything out and fabricated a new beam with no hole drilled.
We also ran the radiant
heat in the kitchen ceiling for the second guest bedroom. This was more
complicated that the others because the bays are very wide (24"+ as
opposed to modern construction which is 16") and we are keeping the beams
exposed. We ran three pex lines down every bay (normally 2) so the layout
took some planning.
The floor above is the
oldest floor in the house. The archaeologist raved about it so we decided
to save and preserve the floor. We had to reinforce the floor (as seen
above) in many locations.
The finished product is
above. We also customized every light in the kitchen ceiling. Since
we want exposed beams we needed super shallow lights. A normal can light
is 8" deep. You can buy shallow cans which are 6" and double
the price but that doesn't help us since we wanted 3" cans. So we are using LED inserts and
cut down the 8" cans to 3". We should have taken pics of the
process because it was not easy and is very custom. You can see how high the cans are mounted on the beams in the pics above. The sheet rock will
be installed between the bays leaving 4" of the 200+ year old hand honed
beams exposed.
Below are pictures of
the oldest floor in the house which we discussed above. We gave it an initial
sand before we installed the radiant heat plates.
Other
highlights: we had to install "nail plates" on every stud where a
wire or pipe was 1.25" or less. It was annoying but will pay off in the future. This way we wont go to install crown molding and nail into a wire. We did this
all over the house. I think we used 200 1x2' nail plates and a few dozen
of larger sizes.
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| We have also been busy getting ready for finishing work as you can see from the pic above. These are the details that take the most time! |
Hopefully our next post
will be of finishing work! Stay tuned!
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