Tales from the plumbing department...

At times, building a house from scratch is challenging, sometimes it is hard, and sometimes you just have to stand back and laugh at the predicament you got your own self into.

Currently we are working hard at installing the plumbing on our guest house. This will be our house we live in for the next couple of years while we continue to build our main house and studio. It's only 600 ft2 so It's not that complicated...a very small bathroom and kitchen that has 1 shower, 1 toilet, 1 bathroom sink and 1 kitchen sink, oh and a set of laundry taps. Not that complicated!

When it came time to get the parts, I was totally prepared. I had everything calculated, everything prepared, every meticulous detail worked out. I knew every fitting, every connection, every pipe required. I was ready! I put on my armour, loaded the family and off to Home Depot we went to do battle. Flash forward...thirty minutes into the ordeal, the kids were sitting on the floor, Audrey, my wife (who was very supportive up till then) says, "I'm taking the kids and we're going for a walk" and there I was perplexed, with a headache, and totally baffled. "What do you mean you can't get a tee with a 2" inlet on 2 sides and a 1 1/2" on the other end" I said to the staff member. Nothing that I needed seemed to be made and I found myself having to marry two or three parts to get to what I originally wanted. Occassionally I would see Audrey peek down the aisle for moral support (as well as to remind me how long we've been there). Two hours later, the battle was done and "We" had conquered the plumbing aisle.

Flash forward to now, so far I've spent about 17 hours running hot and cold water lines, main trunks, venting, "P"s, "Y"s, "T"s and other letters of the alphabet only to find large gaps left between parts for fittings that I "somehow" missed getting when I was in the store. Those few "missed" items fill an entire page on my shopping list and I'm pretty sure even after I get them, I'll still be missing more!

I am also short a length of 4" sewage pipe. Back in the fall time, I know we purchased about 10 lengths of it and we were very careful to pile them in a specific spot of the yard where we put all of our building supplies...and I'm sure sometime in the spring I might even find them again...After spending an hour pushing snow with the tractor trying to find the infamous pile, I gave up and added it to the list of things to buy!

The final plot to the story is something that brings us full circle in our building process. You see, we've poured many, many, many cubic yards of cement, all mixed by hand, and we've done some testing to know how good our mix is, but nothing "concrete" to know how much a large pour can withstand. Our guest house was originally going to be our garage, so plumbing was an after thought which means water and sewage lines need to be fed through the concrete floor to get to the connections outside. This required a 12" x 8" hole to be busted out in the bathroom. I began by using a grinding wheel to score the area to be removed. I then used a chisle and sledge hammer to convince the cement that it wanted to leave...then I moved to an air chisel and three hours later came to this conclusion...When it comes to mixing cement, we're good...no, we're very, very good!