Bathroom Day 7: Reconstruction begins

So Mary decided that going a minimalist route may be too “fashion forward” for the Champaign area, so I guess I need to get started on rebuilding the bathroom again. I’ve decided a decent place to start is with the plumbing.

When it comes to plumbing, my motto is “Variety is the spice of life”. As you can see from the picture to the left, I could not decide which variety of pipe to use for the hot and cold water lines, so I thought I’d put in a little bit of everything. The copper supply lines are coming in from the main water line. I was originally planning on doing everything in copper but have quickly learned why soldering copper pipes together is called ‘sweating’…it’s pretty damn hard work. If you ever want to test your patience, try sweating pipe in a two and a half foot tall crawlspace sitting in a puddle of water that drenched you when your elbow accidentally switch the water back on while trying to reach around the furnace vent and cast iron drain line to get a blow torch on a half inch piece of copper pipe that is wedged up between two floor joists all while trying not to burn down your house. Mary was so confident in my abilities that she even carried the fire extinguisher into the bathroom for that ‘just in case’ moment. This only emboldened me to blow torch on as every true dieharder knows that if you plan for something that might happen, it invariably never does.

Side note: This being the case, my usual attitude is ‘why plan for something to happen if it won’t happen’. Remember, cutting corners saves time and money, time and money that can be well spent in other areas such as convenient care or the emergency room.

After I had worked with the copper for a little while, I quickly realized that my mood was deteriorating rapidly, as evidenced by my run on sentence above. I decided that it was time to switch routes and move on to CPVC. Why you ask? Partially because I didn’t think that the charred embers forming on the floor joists were necessarily a good thing, partially because copper is really expensive, but mostly because I was longing for the ‘glue sniffer’s high’ associated with the PVC cement used to bond CPVC together. (It was that or start sniffing the Sharpie in my pocket…but whenever I do that I always end up with an embarrassing Hitler mustache.) After a few minutes of that stuff in an enclosed space, I quickly forgot all about the copper sweating woes, (although the blue and white polka-dotted elephant that kept singing ‘The Underpants song’ to me in the crawlspace really started freaking me out, although Mary claimed that she could not see or hear it…) Seriously, you'd freak out too if you heard this elephant singing the song to you...check it out on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9mBOWOjxn4om/watch?v=A9mBOWOjxn4

At that point I decided to call it a day and get some fresh air.

That was probably a good idea.