I guess we are on track for quarterly blog updates... that seems to be about the pace we are working these days.

Since last we posted we spent 10 days in Hawaii, and had a ton of fun. We went to Denver and played some politics. And we went to Chicago and just had a good time with 250,000 like minded friends in Grant Park. Needless to say, the house has not been getting it's due attention.

But we have moved to the basement and life is somewhat less chaotic than it had been. We now have a large, warm and relatively clean bedroom as well as a living room downstairs. There are no doors, there is no woodwork. The doors will be finished this fall. The woodwork will probably have to wait until we are ready to do trim work throughout the house.

Before we get to the current project, a dog picture:






















Yes, this is my dog. In my bed. Under the covers. With his head on my pillow. With his front leg wrapped around his favorite stuffed animal (Bonnie the cat).

This photo was not staged. I got up to go take a shower, Hun was getting ready for work. Baker went back to bed.

Ridiculous? Yes, I think so.

Anyway, the current house project is the basement bath.

Over the last several weeks I've gotten it framed and insulated .

The bottom sides of the first floor joists are as much as a 1/2" up or down from each other. They are really a mess and attaching drywall to them would have led to... well, it would not have been good.

So I attached furring strips to the bottom of the joists, and then shimmed them to get a flat ceiling all in the same plane.

You can also see the pex plumbing running through the walls, one line for each fixture, red for hot, blue for cold. These lines feed the laundry room and the bath.

The funky framing below the window is to accommodate a 3" horizontal drain line that will someday serve the second and third floor baths. It took some creativity, but it worked out.

After the framing was completed, it was time to tame the plumbing jungle. PEX is great stuff, and it is certainly the best way to plumb a house, but all the lines running back to a central manifold can make a hell of a mess.

I previously had the plumbing running into the small boiler room next to the bath, but there just wasn't enough room. At the same time, I had a large wasted space under the stairs that also had direct access to the upper floors thorough a utility chase.

So the plumbing has moved under the stairs. I built a small hot water manifold and a larger cold water manifold out of copper. I bought a plastic water manifold that was very slick, but it was not durable enough and I trashed it. $300 lesson learned.

It looks pretty unruly in there now, but it will get cleaned up later. The lines you see now are all the lines for the laundry, basement bath, outside hose bibs, existing kitchen, new kitchen and first floor bath.

As new lines are needed they can drop down from the upper floors and into this closet to make their connections.

And then it was time to drywall again. You may recall me complaining about this stuff. It's got a fiberglass mat instead of paper and there is fiberglass in the gypsum as well. Carrying it and cutting it lead to little fiberglass particles in your forearms and lungs.

Very unpleasant. But mold also finds it very unpleasant, so it's worth using.

I only have a few more pieces to hang in the boiler room and the end of it can't come soon enough.

[This is Hun giving herself some credit for a few hours of work. Is it ridiculous that Baker is just standing there watching?]














With the ceiling done.
















The shower.






















The plumbing closet.


















The room is too small to get any sort of perspective from the pictures, sorry. But the drywall is up and last night I started laying out the locations of all the fixtures on the walls and planning the tile layout.

There will be subway tile all around the bathroom at about the height of the yellow line (a little higher).














The shower will also be subway tile. We still need to figure out a floor tile, but I think we are leaning toward a classic octagon shaped tile with some sort of accent or border.

The vanity will be sort of a table with a countertop and sink. I'm finishing up the plans for it now, and I'll probably start building it in the next week or two. A lot of the tile work has to wait for a plumbing fixture in the shower, it may take up to a month to get it. American Standard makes great fixtures, but their distribution system is not so great.

That's about where it stands. I got a cold after Hawaii, and another one after Chicago, so I'm tired of being sick and just starting to get over this second one. Hun has just picked up the bug, so she's sick. But that just means we'll stay home all weekend and get things done.

I have to do a lot of woodworking in the next few weeks with a vanity, laundry room cabinets, medicine cabinet, doors and several bookcases yet to build. The first floor living room has become my shop, and I've got a workbench that needs to be finished before I can build all that other stuff. Should be a busy winter.