a busy morning

[kareina]

 One would think that today would be a smart day to sleep in, since the plane didn’t land last night till 22:45, which meant that it was just before midnight before we were home, the cats had had treats, the litter box emptied, and a quick shower taken so I could get to bed (yay pre-flight airport yoga, which meant I could go nearly straight to bed) just before midnight. But no, I hopped up with Keldor just after 05:00, and while we talked during his drive to work I managed to:

 

• Clean away all of the things at the back of the “walk in closet” in the bedroom (created by putting the paperback bookshelves about a meter in front of the built in closets along one way) so that I could move the litter box there (after taping some butcher paper to the walls)
• moved the litter box to the prepared place, and cleaned all of the litter that had collected around it back into the box.
• emptied the cupboard above the litter box, moving the cleaning supplies to the space in the kitchen under the microwave and food dehydrator, the towels into the cupboard with the sheets, and the miscellaneous other things to the craft supplies room. So that cupboard is ready for the plumbers to drill holes through the one side of it to run plumbing through
• cleaned up the garage enough to make room for more stuff
• Moved most things in the laundry room to the garage
• took the various bits of scrap wood left over from the building of the framework for the walls in the attic, and cutting away the old floor for Create extra bathrooms to the cellar, where some of it will be re-used in other projects, and others will be burned in the furnace on days Keldor wants extra hot water for a bath.

I got that all done on time to have breakfast before the plumbers arrived. It turns out that they had expected that Simon would have put the holes through the floor and into the cellar for the pipes to the attic, but clearly Simon didn’t know that, so Marcus will call him to arrange that and discuss details, while Niklas started on work in the cellar. He is cutting away the existing plumbing in the laundry room completely, and getting it set up to move the water for the washing machine over to the other side of the room, where it will live, and install both a toilet and sink where the washer stands now.

 

Of course, this means I can’t flush the toilet or run water down the sink till he’s done. I have extra drinking and cooking water in the fridge and filled a couple of buckets for washing with, and put a bucket in the sink to catch washing water. A small inconvenience for what will be a huge improvement! I am really looking forward to having another toilet and a sink in the basement. Just think—one will be able to wash one’s hands after doing messy things in the workshop, without having to come up stairs!

 

Soon after I wrote that much, Niklas came up and said that Markus had spoken to Simon, who hadn’t thought about preparing the closet for the plumbing pasing through when he did his cost estimate. Niklas wondered if opening that up was something that Keldor and I could do today? If so he could do the downstairs today, and come back tomorrow to get the pipes to the attic taken care of.

 

I called Keldor, and found out that in addition to being tired from staying up way too late picking me up from the airport last night, he was also having a n especially difficult day at work. He started the day with a job in the platinum extraction room at Boliden’s ore processing plant, a place that is very warm. The whole day was spent in various locations at that instalation, working in temperatures ranging from 25⁰ to 30⁰ C, while wearing full protective gear, so he spent the whole day dripping sweat while doing extremely physical instalation jobs.

 

As soon as I heard that I understood how his day was going, I knew that if we were going to open up acess to the existing pipes in that closet (currently the part of the plumping system that opens out on the roof’s vent stack to ensure that the drainage works), it would have to be me, who does the job.

 

So I made the quick decision to prioritize the house over work (an easy decision given that I was too tired to be at full brain capacity for data mapping, and taking shelves out of the closet and opening the wall sounded more fun just then).

 

It took all day. This house was built by a professional who built it as his own house, and when he did that enclosed area to protect that pipe in the corner of the closet he didn’t intend for anyone to ever open it up again.

 

If I had been prepared to destroy the building materials in the process, it would have been easier. However, when the plumbing in the attic is installed, we still want that closet to function as a closet, so I wanted the shelves intact, which meant not only hammering (with the big wooden hammer) from the underside to get their nails holding them to the small shelf support edge boards, it was also necessary to remove those shelf supports to get the very perfectly fit shelves to rotate enough to losen so I could remove them. The shelf with a metal rod closet bar under it was only possible to remove after Nikals bent the rod for me to extract it.

 

Ok, the bottom shelf, which Keldor and I had installed when we converted that closet to an open bottom area for the litter box, and an upper enclosed cupboard for cleaning supplies on the bottom and towels and other things on the upper shelves, was easy to removed, as we had installed that one into the existing closet space, so the shelf was just enough smaller than the space to make it possible to rotate into place and then sit on wider shelf supports than used for the upper shelves, which were installed before the front part of the closet frame and door were installed.

 

(Keep in mind that the back corner of the closet, where the pipe enclosure is, takes only ¾ of the space, so the shelves all have a small L shaped projection to one corner, that makes rotation for removal challenging.)

 

Once I managed to get all the shelves I started removing masonite layer from the pipe enclosure, with no care to preserve that bit, I accepted that I was destroying it, I don’t know about new masonite, but the 70 year old stuff crumbles when you pry on it, and the finising nails holding it in place have heads so small the can’t be extracted without lifting the masonite itself (and, since it was painted, the nail location wasn’t even visible till I started prying).

 

Once the masonite was out of the way it revealed a solid tongue in grove board construction under layer, with the length of the boards running from floor to ceiling. The boards, having been sealed under the painted masonite since the house was built in 1956, still look fresh and new and yellow, so I knew that I wanted to preserve them at full length, if possible.

 

I rather suspected that Keldor would vote for using them in some other project(s), and do a different solution to that closet corner, so I started by prying the edge board enough to losen the nails enough to remove them. However, that wasn’t enough to take it out, as the top of that board was surrounded by a thin layer of the masonite on the celing of the closet, and the base went into the floor of the closet, which is 5 cm higher that the floor of the room.

 

I tried using the chisel to shave away the ceiling masonite, and got enough cleared away thatI could tilt the board out, but the base wouldn’t pull out from under the closet floor. Eventually, I consulted with the plumber. We decided that it may be nailed to something under there, and it isn’t worth taking apart the front of the closet to lift the floor to get those boards loose.

 

Instead, the plumber used his oscillating tool to cut all of the boards off at 20 cm height, which made it possible to remove the boards and expose the pipe ready for him to change it out tomorrow.

 

By then the plumber was ready to head home, his workday done.