Holes

So the renovation is effecting all but 3 rooms in our house. Since we're moving the vanity to the opposite side of the bathroom, the drain pipe needs to be longer. And a longer drain pipe means more slope is needed (.25 inches per foot of pipe). In order to get the proper slope, we needed to take the drain pipe into the guest bedroom closet ceiling, through the wall and into the bathroom above the door, through the bathroom wall, and into the hall closet, through the back of the closet wall and into the office closet where it meets up with the main soil stack. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) we were planning on redoing the downstairs bathroom next year, so we'll be able to cover up the piping. Also, in order for the plumber to get the new hot and cold water piping up stairs we needed to open up the entire wall encasing the soil stack. And by "we" I mean Richard the plumber did this without letting me know he had to take the entire wall and stud down. More repair work for me. Yay! It also seems like we're taking 4 steps back and 1 step forward every time we go upstairs. The walls were to a point where we had about 50% of the drywall off, then we learned that the ceiling and outside wall was not insulated at all (unless you call 1935 newspaper insulation). Since we've already made such a huge mess, lets make it bigger. Collette spent the afternoon ripping down nearly all the drywall and disposing of the newspaper. We created more work for ourselves, but since we had to drywall so much already, we might as well properly insulate the bathroom while we're at it. I started the built-in bookshelf yesterday. It took awhile to get started because I've never cut into a wall like this, much less cut studs in half, and I did make a few miscuts... e.g. I cut the wall too high. You can see the new header studs, which shouldn't be visible due to this miscut. Now that I think about it, it wasn't really a miscut per say... but more of a "oh crap... the roof is closer than I tought... we're not going to get the desired shelf depth if I take it up this high". So I improvised and just have to patch up the drywall. I also built the shelf box to perfectly. I didn't leave any room to put the box into the hole. For the next built in I need to leave 1/8" or 1/4" all around, then use shims to get a tight fit. So to fix this perfectness I cut the studs back 1/4" or so, and hammered the header back up, and then shimmed the gap. I don't have a picture of the box, but it's a 1/2" MDF board box carefully screwed together (pre-drilling avoided splitting of the board). For the laundry built it I'm going to go with a 3/4" board for a little more forgiveness with screwing it together. I'm also waiting to put the box in the hole permanently until a camera guy comes out. If we do too much without getting recorded we won't have a happy producer. The latest pictures in no particular order.... Shelf built-in hole.