Thursday, July 14, 2016

Why so many posts this week?

In case you are wondering, there are two reasons for the number of posts this week:

1) I want to get them all done before the next batch of travel (camping locally, then back East, for all of us,  followed by four consecutive work trips for Chad)

and 2)  I'm keeping an eye on the demolition work currently going on in our master bathroom.  We've hated the way it is cramped and closed up with too many doors getting in the way ever since we moved in, and we knew there was nasty stuff in the walls and ceiling due to an undisclosed vent fan leak, and are finally getting around to having something done about it.
So far this week they've chipped off the cheesy floor covering, which was glued down to the slab in a most annoying manner, pulled out the ugly cabinet, removed the nasty old painted-over thin panelling that is what was used instead of sheetrock (original to the house!), found a mysterious set of live wires buried in the wall that must have previously belonged to a now non-nonexistent switch,  discovered that the radiant heat pipes near the toilet were most inconveniently located necessitating a change in planned configuration so as not to disturb them, located the ancient guy who services our ancient boiler for the radiant heat and had him in to depressurize the boiler so there isn't a problem if they accidentally nick a pipe while chipping out the toilet, learned about the overly-complicated City of Sunnyvale structural skylight rules, pulled out the shower, found all the roof boards that are gross, and made a plan to replace those boards hopefully without disturbing the foam roof.


Today's new discovery while chipping out the slab around the toilet pipes so they can scoot the toilet over a bit: the copper water pipes were connected to a piece of steel rebar by a piece of wire.  Stupid --  this leads to corrosion and leaking, all buried in the cement slab. Now they get to dig out even more concrete to make sure that they can replace all of the corroded pipe.  I sort of wonder how long this has been slowly leaking into the slab

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