Day 274- Hold onto your butts

We bought the house 2 months ago. We haven't had a kitchen since. We have, however, had mice, a snake, crickets, skeeters, stink bugs and two trips to urgent care. The Hubbs and I have been working on the house by ourselves, with a little help from my Dad and lots of support from family. In this time, we've had little obvious progress, yes we knew what work had been done, but if a stranger came by it just looked a mess. This all changed this past weekend. Within three days we went from a big empty room with a wall still open to a enclosed space with upper cabinets installed. Hooooooly crap!

So this week I will be bringing updates for each of the little things we've done over the previous week. I warn you, it's gone from "oh we ripped up MDF for 12 hours" to "we insulated, drywalled, taped, assembled and hung cabinets".


So as I said. Hold onto your butts, it's about to get serious up in here!




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When we bought the house, we knew that there was some water getting into the basement. There were three suspects in the matter:

1) The foundation was leaking
2) The kitchen sink pipe was leaking
3) The gutters were so full that water was running into the basement instead of down the downspout

And the winner is................

The kitchen sink! The Hubbs was in the basement doing something when I was running water in the old sink, and he could hear it running out in the basement. So he ripped open the walls and found this:

That looks nice and solid

Yes, that is a hole in the pipe that rusted out. That's gotta go. But we weren't in a hurry. We have a bathtub to wash dishes!

Now that we are further in the reno, we decided it was time. Time to fix the pipes. Since we forced the seller to give us a home warranty, I just popped online and reported a plumbing problem. Two days later we had a plumber out and got the follow news;

1) The whole pipe is corrugated steel and likely  is rusted shut (think of arteries and cholesterol)

Guess how AWESOME the basement smelled. Just guess!

2) Whoever did the last fix, likely because the pipe is rusted shut, didn't tie the PVC into the air vent, meaning not only do we have a 2 inch pipe closed to .5 inches, we there's no suction to help.

3) The PVC portion of the pipe isn't on a downward slope and is full of water and old food stuff. Um, delicious?

4) All of the steel piping has to come out for a proper fix.

Luckily, our plumber is awesome and got all but $120 covered by the warranty. Thanks John! So on Friday he was out replacing all the pipes and running lines so that our kitchen sink would drain like a dream.

So we went from this:

See the multiple pipes and danglies?

To this:

Down to one pipe

And no danglies!

Oh, and we removed the extra weird pipe that was sticking out of the wall. But that was all Hubbs and his Sawsall. Gotta love a handy man!

Now that water is going to FLY through those pipes. Step one DONE.