This morning I cut a hole in a wall to mount to a vent/grate. I am not taking any chances with the hack job half bath having frozen pipes again.
I already removed the pipes from under the floor and routed them inside the room (think 100 year old copper runs inside the room) but there is about two feet of piping that comes up from the basement through a wall and into the bathroom. I cut a hole in that wall and mounted a 6x4 heating grate to allow warm air into the wall cavity. I also put a metric fuck ton of insulation under the pipes in the floor leaving open air above said pipes. I will be checking the pipes daily and if it looks bad I will use heated tape on them.
Told you it was coming :-p Though fortunately for me I don't tend to get hit with that stuff while I'm trying to sleep ^_^
I'm too calm and rational when I'm awake. Sleep is where brain will freak out if it's going to freak out. Like a few days ago I dreamed that on the final walk through the previous owner had taken the siding with them. ??? The fuck if I know. What was bothering me in my sleep was the fact that we had a ton of rain yesterday so on the walk through last night the basement smelled very damp. Now the "basement" was originally a crawl space that was half excavated for a basement. Half of it is still the original dirt floor. It's going to be damp when it rains, this is normal. Rational George understands this, sleeping George doesn't.
That's my favorite blog ever. I really feel for the guy, that's why all my houses tended to need to be rehabbed instead of already having been rehabbed.
Not to belittle the issue, but that does sound fairly tame. Valve replacement is something you could learn on YouTube and not take much time or money to fix. The real bitch is the timing, given that you have a ton of other shit on your plate at the moment. Good luck!
I'm not worried about the valve, but it's a thing that needs to be addressed at some point.
I also need to wire the house for ethernet so I can has internet. Verizon was nice enough to turn on the ethernet port in my optical terminal, but now my wifi is in the basement.
I managed to find a small space heater that fit in the hole I cut to mount the vent. The pipes thawed quick enough for use but by the end of the day the extension that I had capped off fully thawed and the freezing shifted the cap just enough to cause a leak. A leaki couldn't hear from the inside but was obvious from outside the house when I saw water dripping from under the floor.
Water is off again and I need to find my pipe cutter so I can trim the extension back to about an inch of the supply line. If it freezes again I rip out the entire line and replace it with pex at from shutoff valve in the basement. At least they pit shutoff valves in when they added in the bathroom.
So since I've bought the house the first week was cold and the performance from our baseboard heat left a lot to be desired. I had installed a programmable thermostat a few days after moving in and it was set to go down to 65 at night and then go back up to 68 during the day. Well it was taking hours to climb back up. I know baseboard heat is slow, but this was just crazy. Had a guy out the look at it today and he says the circulator pump doesn't sound good and probably isn't moving the water around as fast as it needs to. While he was telling me about this, the furnace turned off because the water inside was getting too hot. So while our furnace is 70,000 BTUs, the pump isn't moving water fast enough to get the 70,000 BTUs to the baseboards. Gonna cost about $1200 to fix.
You could take the opportunity to look at home efficiency programs while you are at it. I have no idea if your state even offers anything, but over here in NJ, I was able to get a $5,000 state rebate, some federal tax breaks, and a 10-year 0% interest $10,000 loan to do major HVAC work, as long as I had a company certify it would reduce my whole-house energy consumption by a certain percentage. It did, and the savings on my bills covered what I took out on the loan.
I learned a lesson: do not click the "please contact me" button on Zillow. You will have 30523905542543 real estate agents spam the fuck out of you.
I have weeded them out successfully.
There seem to be a good number of things out there for us to peruse, and 2 of the 3 we've looked at so far are viable choices. Each needs some work, but that's expected. We're looking at more rural areas (since we qualify for a USDA rural housing loan), so I kind of expected some older houses in need of some love. I'm trying to stay in the 20th century, but there are some attractive 19th century houses (that would take a lot more love than many houses) for even more attractive prices.
Comments
Being an adult is fucking weird, man.
I already removed the pipes from under the floor and routed them inside the room (think 100 year old copper runs inside the room) but there is about two feet of piping that comes up from the basement through a wall and into the bathroom. I cut a hole in that wall and mounted a 6x4 heating grate to allow warm air into the wall cavity. I also put a metric fuck ton of insulation under the pipes in the floor leaving open air above said pipes. I will be checking the pipes daily and if it looks bad I will use heated tape on them.
Come back after you've sufficiently shat your pants.
I also need to wire the house for ethernet so I can has internet. Verizon was nice enough to turn on the ethernet port in my optical terminal, but now my wifi is in the basement.
Water is off again and I need to find my pipe cutter so I can trim the extension back to about an inch of the supply line. If it freezes again I rip out the entire line and replace it with pex at from shutoff valve in the basement. At least they pit shutoff valves in when they added in the bathroom.
I learned a lesson: do not click the "please contact me" button on Zillow. You will have 30523905542543 real estate agents spam the fuck out of you.
I have weeded them out successfully.
There seem to be a good number of things out there for us to peruse, and 2 of the 3 we've looked at so far are viable choices. Each needs some work, but that's expected. We're looking at more rural areas (since we qualify for a USDA rural housing loan), so I kind of expected some older houses in need of some love. I'm trying to stay in the 20th century, but there are some attractive 19th century houses (that would take a lot more love than many houses) for even more attractive prices.