Yesterday, my plumber finally began work after many delays. When I got home from my job last night, I went over to my house (not living in it yet) to check on his progress. Imagine my surprise to find that the waste stack he had told me he'd change to a 3" was still the same size as the old one!
This, impacts my kitchen plan enormously as I have my range and hood, right in front of this piping, and at the size it is, it can't be hidden behind the drywall.
I called him up at 8pm, and he graciously answered my call. He told me he remembered us discussing this and telling me it was a code issue. I told him, I remembered telling him, that I couldn't afford to change the piping all the way up to the 2nd floor (to the master bath) due to having to rip out existing vintage tiling/ruining the wall and having to repair that too and, him assuring me we could just change the run from the basement to kitchen (basement stack was in bad condition). Hope that all made sense.
Whatever the case, there obviously was a misunderstanding and something had to be fixed/figured out. We agreed to discuss it today.
I decided to take the day off, realizing seeing him in person would be best. When I got to the house this morning, my contractor also told me he remembered the conversation as I remembered it - that he could do the 3" pipe regardless. Contractor - was not pleased either, and there were some other minor issues to correct (nothing major).
Also, we had no water connected in the house - and this bothered me also. He should have informed me that no service would be available, because I would have probably ordered a Port-O-John for the workers today. I mean, WTH did he expect these guys to do for a bathroom all day? As it was, we ran off to Home Depot last night to purchase several large buckets for water, to use to flush the toilets once he got the waste stack issue back together. Ugh.
Anyway - he got there early, thankfully and we all had a pow wow over this. My main contractor mentioned him rerouting the piping, but there didn't seem to be a logical way to do it. Another option was for me to suck up the expense of tearing out the whole stack up through the 2nd floor. I, was NOT about to do that. The 3rd choice? Frame out the kitchen another 3" from the wall to accommodate the pipe.
We chose option 3, which I wasn't entirely thrilled with but made the most sense overall. However, this impacted my cabinets of course. The long wall, with the majority of the appliances, was fine - with room to spare. However, the "L" section of it was not. It caused the end cabinets to overhang into the doorway. Rutroh.
I called my KD to see what could be done. Luckily, today was the last day to make changes without me getting charged. He told me if I could come in, we could rework that part and if we got it in before 4pm, no harm done.
So, I ran off. Lost a 9" end cabinet, and had to change the upper from a 30" to a 27". Lost my garbage/recycling bottom cabinet and it became just a garbage cabinet and of course, less counter space but this area wasn't very large anyway, not a part of the kitchen which was going to be used for anything particularly necessary. Not awful - could have been worse.
In the meantime - there was a lot of running back and forth (I had to dash back home to find current design plans at one point) and it was like 95 degrees out, and humid, and the a/c in the house can't be turned on with the construction going on (new, too much dust to get into the system). There were flurries of phone calls about numerous other things, including our mason dropping of brick samples late in the day for us to look at (walkway repairs).
To say I felt like a limp, worn out dishrag is putting it mildly.
However, I felt like I accomplished a lot today. At the KD, I finally found hardware, and ordered it. I also made a decision on a sink - Elkays version of a quartz composite (just need to ask contractor about whether or not he feels comfortable about cutting out the base to fit in a larger sink than would usually go into it). Also, found a few faucets I like - just have to make a decision on which I prefer and last but not least, saw an awesome porcelain floor tile, something really unusual - looks kind of like petrified wood which sounds odd, but is stunning and wasn't too much money.
Came home, passed out for a couple of hours. Now I'm watching "So You Think You Can Dance" and relaxing, and trying to forget about what happened earlier in the day :p
eustacem
sheainli
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