Well, actually, even the kitchen sink is here.
This is a beautiful sink. It is huge! And something else arrived too.
Those boxes contain our Toto* toilets. Those are the toilets that will flush… although not for a while yet because we have to hook them up.
Meanwhile, outside, the railings are in on the front porch.
Sweet.
*This is not an ad for Toto toilets, and I get no money from them for showing this photo, and in fact I paid a pretty penny for those things so they better flush or else!
Things have gotten interesting in the Fallapartment again. In the downstairs bathroom we have a hangfire toilet. What is that? After you flush it and the water is gone, it sits there doing nothing for about 20 seconds before it starts to refill the tank. I have no idea why that happens, or even how I would design a toilet to make it do that. It flushes, and then there is nothing………… and then it starts to fill. Strange.
It doesn’t flush very well either, so one day I opened it up to see why this strange stuff is happening. I found out that our landlords have installed a “water saver” system in the tank, and that keeps the toilet from flushing. Since I am an artist, I decided to draw a diagram to illustrate how the insides of the toilet work. Here it is.
The “bucket” is the water saving device. It surrounds the flapper valve completely and it keeps most of the water from flowing down to the flapper valve to make the toilet flush. As you can see from the diagram, the piddly two inches of water left above the bucket doesn’t provide enough hydraulic persuasion to move the … uh… material… down the pipe. Hence, the toilet doesn’t flush. You could probably save even more water if you just stuffed a rag into the flapper valve hole without losing much more of the toilet function.
I would remove the device from the tank, except that I am a better artist than a plumber (well…. ok… marginally), and I don’t want to get involved in that.
So, we just flush it twice.
I have not figured out how the water saving device makes the toilet delay the filling of the tank for 20 seconds. That will take some further analysis. And, to make matters worse, the toilet has begun to hang on the flush end as well. We push down the lever, and the toilet sits there for 10 to 20 seconds… and then it flushes………. and then it sits there thinking about it for another 10 to 20 seconds…. and starts to fill up. I think it might be haunted.
The other plumbing news is that this:
started to leak this afternoon. That is the drain from the sink-that-won’t drain. After looking at it, we found that the screwy part (the thing with the knobs) had become unscrewed, and the pipe had fallen apart. We screwed it back together and it appears to work, but we left the bucket there just in case. The sink-that-won’t-drain now doesn’t drain just as well as it used to.
In case you are interested, the big, gray pipe comes in from the worst-dishwasher-in-the-world. I don’t think that the toilet comes into play here, but you never know what is going to happen.
Part of the house has been plastered. The walls now look more like walls and less like a battleship.
Below is a photo of the closet and bathroom doors in the master bedroom.
Those things in the far left corner of the room are stilts. The plasterers walk on stilts to do the ceilings. Here is a closeup.
Look at this photo of the doorway.
That is an interesting place to leave your putty knife.
Plastering makes a real mess. Yuk. Look what they did to one of the bedrooms.
I suppose that will all get cleaned up before we move in.
I hope.
Here is another photo of some walls in and around the stairway going from the second floor to the first floor.
Looks like walls.
Just for grins, my son rendered an image from a 3D model he built last Winter when the house existed only on paper. The model was done on his computer using the 3D modeling tool, Blender. The “photo” of the model below was taken from the same location in the house as the real photo above.
So, you see, we have known what this house was going to look like all along.
P.S. He did not model the plaster all over the floor.
They put the front steps on today. Look at this!
That is going to be really nice after they put the railings on it.
I kind of like the white door and the white posts and the white risers. That looks really classy.
Our heating company delivered our first tank of oil today. But first, since I have not posted a photo of the house for a while, here are a couple.
Notice that the shutters are on.
The front porch is also almost finished.
Here is an interesting detail. The lanterns have been mounted near the doors.
That looks nice!
Well, back to the subject line. The heating company delivered a tank of oil today. Here is the tank all hooked up.
You can see by the gauge that it is full of oil.
The tank is all plumbed into the burner.
That looks like something out of Star Wars.
Our downstairs air handler is all set up too. Check this out.
We are ready for Winter….. well, once they get the electricity hooked up to it. Here’s the panel.
Hey! There are some more circuit breakers in there! Maybe they did hook it up.
Meanwhile, upstairs, the plasterer has started taping the walls.
Next step – plaster
I just spent another $23.84 on light bulbs today… and we are not done yet. Yikes! We could go broke on just light bulbs alone.
Speaking of consumable items, I spent some time today figuring out what kind of filters to get for our new air handling unit in the attic. After a few hours of research I have figured out that we need the Glassfloss MERV 8 Class II 18x20x1 HV.
Gesundheit!
Today was a slow day at the house. Other than spending $86.83 on light bulbs (and we aren’t finished with the light bulbs yet) nothing much happened. So I thought I would digress a bit and show you this:
That is the dishwasher that has been inflicted upon us in the Fallapartment. It is an “apartment size” dishwasher, which I suppose is verbally justified since we are living in an apartment, but when you consider that this apartment has three bedrooms and four people living in it, the device comes up short. This is the worst dishwasher ever invented. There is nothing in the top basket to keep the glasses from slipping sideways, so the mortality rate of our glassware is huge (we want to get new glassware anyway, so we keep using it). In the bottom basket, the flatware box sits half way in the middle, leaving a large part of the basket useless. Only half the dishes that we use for a meal will fit in the thing, so we spend a lot of time standing at the “sink-that-won’t-drain” anyway.
Oh, and see that white stuff on the door? That is the soap. We have to just sort of huck some soap into it to get it to wash because the doors on the soap dispenser no longer open, and when we run it with the soap in the box, we end up with dirty dishes and a soap brick in the hole. So we just toss some soap into it, close the door, and hope.
And don’t even get me started on the “new stove”.
Well, I told you it was a slow day. Keep hoping that something exciting will happen at the house so you won’t have to suffer through any more posts like this one. At least it follows the 15 second rule…. if you read fast.
We are connected to the pole! We have power!
I went down into the basement to see the panel….
Hey! Where are all the circuit breakers at? Well, I guess we have power anyway.
At least the hot water tank is hooked in.
As soon as we get some power, maybe we will get some hot water.
Back upstairs the wall board continues to go up. Our cathedral ceiling in the plant room is up.
Can the plaster be far behind?
Some of the downstairs walls and ceilings went in today. Here’s the kitchen.
And here is the living room.
The photos are dark because it is dark out now by the time I can get to the house.
I don’t have much time to blog tonight because of my crazy schedule so this is going tobeafastblogandIwillhavetotyperealfastandthisonewillbemostlyphotos….
Some of the wallboard is up. They did most of the second floor.
Door into the full bath.
Closet and entry in the West bedroom.
Closet in the East bedroom.
The door on the left goes into the master bedroom closet. The one on the right goes into the master bedroom bath.
Looking the other way in the master bedroom. That is the South East corner. Morning sun will come through those windows.
The stairway down from the attic.
While I was up in the attic, I noticed this:
That is the air handler for the upstairs heating/air conditioning. The gray pipes bring the hot water up from the basement for the heat, and the black pipes bring the cold refrigerant up from the A/C compressor for the air conditioning.
End of quick tour.
