Home Stretch??

Milestones. We've passed two big ones in the last couple weeks. First off - Brick!

The bricklayer and his crew started work about two weeks ago. All in all, it took them about 3 days to lay all the brick veneer (over 2100 bricks in all). They started out by laying everything out and getting their equipment ready.






The first couples courses were the most time consuming, but once they got going, it went pretty fast.




With two guys working, they went through nearly a whole pallet the first day. They came back two days later armed with three more pallets of brick and a crew of 5 guys.



We matched the brick (Old Phoenix) and they did the best they could to match the mortar color which was died a darker shade of gray than normal. I had them tooth in the new veneer to the old which makes the transition invisible from the street and barely noticeable close up. Below, you can see where they removed half bricks from the old/existing veneer. They then replaced the voids will full bricks as they went along creating a seamless transition.




They flew through the work the second day and came back Friday to finish up. The finished product looks absolutely great and like its been there all along. I'll follow up on the old veneer to scrub down the green brick which will make everything match perfectly. I have never liked the green ones anyway!




One small project before we move on to the next big one. In anticipation of the drywallers, I set about forming the pre-pitch on the shower pan and putting in the pan liner. I used a coping saw with the handle removed to cut the shower drain pipe below grade at just the right level and then backfilled the hole with concrete. After allowing the concrete to cure for 24 hours, Jason and I starting laying out the pre-pitch guides. These nifty, long plastic pieces have a built in slope to them so that an amateur (me) can lay out a custom mortar bed with the correct/required pitch.



All showers will leak at some point. Mortar is not water proof and even if you seal it, hairline cracks will eventually develop which will allow water to seep past the tile/mortar and then down through the mortar bed to the waterproof membrane. If you don't have a pre-pitched slope underneath the membrane, you end up with small amounts (or in some cases, large amounts) of standing water. This water then rapidly aids in the development of mold and mildew which will ruin the shower in short order. The pre-pitch creates a slope that leads to the drain. The water that makes it through the tile and mortar bed and onto the membrane now has a sloped path to drain away. This is critical to shower construction and a step often neglected by homeowners and unscrupulous builders. For our bathroom, we wanted to do it the right way the first time!

We mixed the deck mud just a bit wetter than a pro would, which helps in the troweling required to use the plastic pitch product. A pro would normally use a much dryer mix, but he also wouldn't use the plastic pitch guide since he's done 100's or 1000's of shower pans. The end result:



Over the top of that, we carefully placed a 6 foot by 8 foot sheet of pvc shower pan liner (the membrane) and stapled it to the studs about 8 inches above the ground level. Where the liner met the drain we used a heavy bead of 100% silicone caulk and bolted the flange down over the membrane to the receiver we glued in the night before. I'll take a picture when I do the final mortar bed this weekend.

On to drywall!!! The drywallers were scheduled to show up at 8am last Saturday. We both spent the night before (Friday) feverishly finishing little things that needed to be done prior to drywall. It was a rude awakening to be sure when we woke to the sounds of the dog barking and a fist pounding on our front door at....6:45am... Over an hour early. No problem, we made due but I did find their attitude a bit annoying. They seemed kind of pissy that we didn't answer the door right away (remember we were dead asleep and had to throw on some clothes, etc., plus the doorbell is broken right now so they may have been "ringing" for a while). At any rate, we brushed it off and they got to work. They had everything hung, taped and mudded the first day.






In the bathroom, we used greenboard, which is a slightly more moisture resistant drywall that also has some mold resistance. For the shower, they used a fiberglass impregnated board called "DensShield" which handles a lot like drywall, but is used for tile backing. (We'll go over this will a few coats of redguard to water seal evertything prior to tiling over it.) Ceilings got no sag drywall and the closet got standard drywall. I pray to god they didn't hit any pipes or wires. Even though everything was "protected" by metal plates, you just never know...They missed a number of studs with their screw guns and I've heard of guys running screws/nails right through the 16ga. protective plates. We'll find out I guess....hope everything is ok!!!

We decided on a 90/10 sante fe finish which is basically a 90% smooth surface with 10% rough patches randomly spread on the wall. It hides small imperfections in the wall and was drastically cheaper than a completely smooth finish. The weather was more humid than usual, so the guys had to wait 36 hours before they could come back to apply the 2nd coat of mud and texture. They arrived Monday morning and were done in about three hours. They were back the following day to sand and clean up. The end result looks pretty awesome!



Its amazing to walk into the bathroom and see the structure finally coming together. All those months of framing and plumbing and electric and everything else...Its all hidden now. If all goes well, the only people who will look at any of that in the next 40+ years will be those who see the pictures on my blog.

We've already started priming the walls and this weekend we'll move on to paint and getting the mortar bed for the shower done and the tub placed. Then its on to tile, which I ordered today. Good god, tile is expensive. I won't say what I spent, but I ordered 342 square feet of 12x24 tile in a really nice gray color along with 29 square feet of a beautiful linear mosaic comprised of glass, marble and travertine strips. I also ordered enough bullnose (I hope) for the project and about 114 square feet of high quality, birch wood flooring for the closet. I'm told everything should be in by late next week. I'll have to pick it up in chunks because I understand the tile alone will weigh well over 1000 pounds. Now to see if our neighbor will loan us his commercial grade tile saw... O.O

Movin' Along!

Well its been almost exactly a month since my last post. I'm not sure how to feel about that since I just realized that means I've been working on plumbing and electric for that long... BUT - We're movin' right along!! Lots of updates today.

This was the state of the junk pile in the backyard the last time I posted. Its a combination of dirt and concrete from the foundation excavation and a bunch of construction debris (wood, a door, pipe, lots and lots of nails, old shingles, etc.) In short - a deathtrap sure to cause tetanus and other injury!


This pile really needed to go - so I found a guy on craigslist with a backhoe, 6 ton trailer (he was even licensed and insured, woohoo). He came in with his helper and they removed all the debris and most of the dirt in short order.


All done! Much better!


As I mentioned last time, we put in our window. Here is a view from the outside.


As anyone who has done a permitted addition to their house knows, you have to bring the whole house up to smoke detector code as part of the permit stipulations. Generally speaking, this means a smoke detector in each bedroom and another in an area "central" to the bedrooms. And battery powered detectors wont cut it. You are required to have hard wired (powered by the house electric system) battery backed-up, interconnected detectors (so if one goes off, they all go off).

This was part of the project I was dreading...Running electric up in the attic. Yuck! So I spent about 2 miserable hours up in the attic a few weekends ago, crawling through the insulation and finding suitable spots for the detectors. Once located, I drilled a pilot hole through the ceiling from inside the attic and then had Jason drill a 3 1/4" hole through the ceiling from inside the house and slip an old work fixture housing up into the hole and secure it. I then fed 14/2 or 14/3 wire (depending on which detector I was at) into the housing and used fireblock foam sealant liberally around the housing to completely air seal it. We stapled the wire to the joists and moved on to the next spot where we repeated the process.

Once again, I don't have any pictures of my work in the attic because it was about 100 degrees, dusty, dirty and just unpleasant up there. No time for pictures. I did get some shots of the fixture housings from in the house though.




Then it was time to move on to the real electric work... The old bathroom had a single conduit running to the bathroom to power the in wall heater, vanity light and the single outlet on the opposite wall. We tore all of that out during demolition. Rather than try and run NM (non-metallic/romex) cable from the panel and through the attic (something that would have been quite difficult, given the panels location) we opted to run conduit on the outside of the house (just like the last bathroom).

I didn't relish trying to work with metal conduit, so I went with PVC conduit instead. We ran two 3/4" lines from the panel up to just under eaves and all the way down to the bathroom. I chose 3/4" instead of 1/2" to make pulling the wire easier.


I spent quite a bit of time researching the restrictions on running electric wire through conduit. There are limitations on how many current carrying conductors your can run in a conduit. And in my area, if you run more than two CCC in conduit for more than two feet, you have to derate the ampacity of the wires according to a schedule. After calculating all the wire derations, I was still well within the specs to use 14 and 12awg wire for my 15 and 20amp circuits.

We ran the wire for two 15amp circuits (one for the bathroom lights, the other for the smoke detectors, closet lights and outlets) in on conduit and shared a single ground wire. Rather than rearrange my panel so that I could run multi branch circuits (a whole new ballgame) I opted to run a separate neutral for each circuit. So the 15amp conduit had 5 wires (2 hot, 2 neutral and 1 ground).

In the second conduit we ran three 20amp circuits (one for the bathroom outlets and vanity lights, another for the bathtub motor and a third for an electric fireplace). We again shared a common ground wire and ran all separate neutrals. All wiring in both conduits were individual black, white and green THHN/THWN wire rated at 90c degrees.

Once the conduit passed into the house, we terminated the conduit at two junction boxes (one for each conduit) and transitioned to NM cable from there (making sure to ground everything, including the boxes). In the picture, you can see blue tape which we used to label each hot wire so we knew which circuit it would control.


Once that was done, it was time to wire everything up inside. We ran 12awg NM (in yellow) to all 20amp outlets and the vanity lights. We ran 14awg NM (in white) to all lights, the fan, smoke detectors (I brought a cable in from the attic the previous weekend) and the outlets in the closet. Everything got locked down with cable clamps and tied together with a twist of the wire and the appropriate wire nuts.


Since we have a future expansion in mind that may include a new master bedroom, and since we would want that master bedroom to connect to our master bathroom via a new doorway, we decided to put in 3 way switches NOW instead of later. I figured the extra $150 now would be worth not having to rewire things later on.

We wanted maximum control over the lighting in the bathroom so that we could create a variety of lighting conditions, from very bright to very subdued. We went with Lutron Maestro dimmer switches for the lights and a matching timer for the exhaust fan. The main bank of dimmers is in a four gang box just inside the bathroom as you enter. One dimmer runs the the four 6" cans along the walls of the bathroom, another runs the three 4" cans in the center of the room and the third dimmer runs the two 6" cans in the shower. The fourth spot is for the fan timer. I had to special order it since our local electric supply didnt carry it for some reason.


Here is the 3 gang box for the companion (3-way) dimmers on the other side of the bathroom before it was finished.


Here you can make out the 20amp wires coming out of the 2 gang box that will house a GFCI outlet centered just above the counter of the vanity, along with a switch for the vanity lights (which will be pendants hung from the ceiling). There are also wires running from that 2 gang box to outlets on either side of the vanity which will hook up to the load end of the GFCI outlet to keep them protected as well.


In addition to electrical, we also finished the plumbing. Here you can see the completed "manifolds" where the 3/4" pex lines branch off into 1/2" pex lines to each fixture. The 3/4" lines then continue to the bathtub.


If that wasn't enough, the HVAC is also done! We had originally planned to do the duct work ourselves, but after some consideration and many hours of struggling over how big the lines should be and how best to run connect them to the existing system, we opted to hire a professional. We took two bids from two reputable companies here in town. One we ultimately decided isn't as reputable as they seem to be...the other we hired! It took hector about 4.5 hours to do the work (he had to do quite a bit of work at the trunk line to make sure everything would work properly). In the end, we have a 10" supply line coming into the addition which then splits into a 7" line for the closet and an 8" line for the bathroom. We also have an air return located in the closet (or excuse me...the Dressing Room...) which will ensure proper airflow and cooling for the southwest facing addition. The location of the return wasn't optimal, but since code strictly forbids returns from being located in a bathroom, and putting it in the bedroom would have been much less effective, this was the only viable option.




The hvac went in on Thursday of last week and while the HVAC guy did his thing, I did all kinds of little things like putting nail plates on the studs to protect wire and pipe. I also hooked up the test gauge for the water pipes and filled it to 60psi, and a variety of other odds and ends. Our aim was to have our pre-drywall inspection the next day - Friday.

Unfortunately, it became clear that there was some sort of leak in the water pipes. I had pressurized the system to 60psi of air and after three hours, it was down to about 45psi - Not good. I was supposed to go on a hike that night with Jason, but decided to cancel in a last ditch effort to salvage our chances of having our inspection the next day. I ended up figuring out that the leak was due to the tub valves being in the open position...the plug I had inserted in the outlet wasn't holding the air. Once I shut the valves and re-pressurized the system to 65psi, it was still holding an hour later. I called in the inspection for the following day, and we spent several hours Thursday night cleaning and taking care of miscellaneous odds and ends. Finally around 10pm, everything was done.

Friday morning came and I got up at 7am to make sure I was awake and moving for when the inspector arrived. They don't give you a window as to when they will come, and on our previous inspections (footers and pre-slab) they hadn't called me to let me know they were there, even though I had left them notes asking them to do so. So this time, I decided to stay home all day and wait for them. I knew the inspector would need access to the inside of the house, and I didn't want to risk them coming by and leaving since I wasn't home. I was so nervous all day... 8am came, then 9, 10, 11... Finally at just before 3pm the inspector arrived. He was a very friendly and nice guy. I let him in and did all the things I had been told to do (be polite and friendly, keep your mouth shut about the project unless asked a direct question, etc.) In the end, the inspector told me that everything looked good and pointed out just a couple things I may want to consider. He wrote me a green ticket and that was that! We passed!!! HURRAY! This was a huge load off my mind since this is the most difficult inspection (electrical, plumbing, hvac and structural).

With the all clear to begin drywall and brick work we got started with insulation and tar paper. We spent most of Saturday putting up two layers of 15lb tar paper on the outside. Tar paper has been in use for a long time and many professionals argue that for the climate here in Phoenix, it makes a superior water barrier than some of the newer house wraps (like tyvek). We went with two layers since I read a study that concluded that the first layer would absorb some water if it got wet, and the second layer would protect the sheathing from any contact with the first layer once it was damp. It was quite a chore to put up, but we got it done.




Sunday, we decided to tackle insulating the walls. We bought R-19 faced fiberglass batts and stapled them up with our hammer stapler. We are nearly finished and just have a few areas and gaps left.




In preparation for the pre-drywall inspection passing (It seemed like a pipe dream at that point, but we prepped anyway) I talked to three different brick layers about doing the full size brick veneer on the outside of the addition. I found one guy on craigslist and he wanted $5K. I found the other two through my masonry supply shop and they came highly recommended. They both came and looked at the job within days of each other, and both gave me bids within $100 of the other (right around $4k). In the end, I selected the guy with the lower bid - not because his bid was lower, but because he is licensed, bonded and insured...the other guy is not. He starts a week from today and expects it will take him 5-6 days to lay the 2100+ bricks.

I've also begun taking bids from drywall companies. I'm meeting with another one in about an hour. So far, its more money than I had hoped to spend on drywall, but I think having a professional do it will yield much nicer results than if I tackle it. And lets face it...with all the time, sweat, tears and cash we're sinking into this project, we want it to look nice!

So here's hoping that my next update will be to show pictures of the finished brick and drywall!! Peace!