Romans, Water, and Gas

Well, this last weekend saw a couple of minor improvements to the home. Nothing that will boost its market value mind you, but something that will build wife-equity nonetheless.

The beginning of the weekend started with a nice little D&D game with friends and some beer. After the past week at work, it was a very nice time. Saturday I visited my past with a friend whom shared that past. I went and talked with the leader of my former Roman war band Sean Richards (Siridean to those in the SCA). Seems the reasons that I left the group many years ago have continued to act as a cancer within the group and the gather is a mere shell of what it used to be in the glory days. Well, we're trying to see if we can get those days back and I'm set to discuss more with Sean tomorrow evening. I'm still a bit apprehensive based on prior feelings and experiences, but we'll see. I'm open to the idea at least and will to see where it leads. There seems to be more of a focus on reenactment and historical accuracy which is fairly exciting.

Sunday saw my foray back into the world of home projects. I/We had taken some time off due to the holidays and busy schedules. I had a few projects to choose from including installing a much needed medicine cabinet in the bathroom, relocating the shelves in the entryway closet, wiring up a motion sensor light over the back garage door, run a line from the reverse osmosis filter system under the kitchen sink to the refrigerator, and dismantling the gas dryer hookups so it's actually up to code.

I started Saturday night but researching what I may be getting into if I actually cut a huge hole in the drywall of the bathroom. Because it I didn't get the medicine cabinet in for some reason (usually ignorance of what I'm getting myself into), then I would definitely lose wife-equity with the gaping hole there until I could a) patch it, b) install the medicine cabinet safely, or c) buy her something pretty. It turns out that I need to find out if the wall I'm going to carefully hack apart by needing to remove a portion of the stud is load baring or not. I'm not a structural engineer and have no idea whether that wall is or not, so I'm postponing that little upgrade until I can get some more information and not risk caving my house in.

I started with the easiest one that I could think of on Sunday morning and worked on removing and relocating the shelves in the entryway closet. I've come to realize and get more confirmation with every project I work on in this house that the prior owners put in things half-assed and without much care. So I now have a closet that the shelving is actually useful and you can actually access most of the space. The only drawback is the prior mounting location has the closet walls looking like so much Swiss cheese. I'll add the patching of those holes to the project list. After replacing all the items in the closet and having a bit of lunch I decided to dive into routing the water line for the refrigerator. This could have been a very frustrating experience but I was clever (if I do say so myself) about routing it. I was prepared to drill a 3/8" diameter hole in the bottom of my cabinet to route the line but found a 1/2" space between the kickboard and the cabinet that I was able to run the line. Great! Now the line won't be inside the cabinet and get banged around by the pots and pans. The next hurdle was to get it past the dishwasher and into the sink area. This was going to be the big challenge. The hole from the sink to the dishwasher area is only about 3-4" and the line I have is in a tight coil and is not going to want to cooperate getting through that hole. Going the other way I wouldn't be able to reach the line from the sink from the other side of the dishwasher as I would be trying to cram myself in the cabinet. This is where the clever comes in. I grabbed a wrapping paper tube and, from the sink side, fed the tube behind the dishwasher. Looking from the cabinet side, I could see the end of the tube. I was able to stretch and get the water line into the tube and starting feeding it into the tube. A few seconds later it popped out of the other end and into the sink area. Viola! The rest was the fairly mundane task of stopping the cold water, bleeding the reverse osmosis tank in to some water bottles, installing a T-junction in the line from the tank to the faucet that would supply the refrigerator with RO water and then just plugging everything in.

After this successful project, I decided to get involved in something more serious, dirty, and aromatic. The gas dryer line as originally installed upon dryer deliver wasn't that safe, definitely not up to code and causing me to lose wife-equity. So, I measured (twice) the lengths of iron pipe and all the fittings I'd need and purchased everything a couple of weeks ago. Iron pipe work is very dirty, I must say. I was able to replace the 15- to 20-year old installation of piping with something a bit more modern and definitely up to code. There was no cleverness in this project, just a matter of the time, inclination, and the matter of getting dirty.Next project will be the motion sensor light so we can see in the back yard when we come home and try to get into the house from the garage.

This morning, I checked for leaks everywhere in the water and the gas hookups and I'm happy to report that I now have homemade automatic ice in my ice cube tray and the garage doesn't stink from the natural gas works.

If I brave the wall-cutting project, I'll be posting pictures.