Winter is starting to rear it's cold, ugly head in our neck of the world now as temperature are staying in the 40's. Although there hasn't been any major accumulation of snow yet, it should be on its way so we're pushing to get the water and sewer installed in the ground before it freezes up. We got the chance to visit on the weekend as the sewer installers were working on getting the grinder pump installed in the ground. They had some difficulty finding a good spot for it due to a higher than expected water table. Initially, they wanted to install it right next to the house so they could have short hook up to the house sewer pipe, but once they dug down, they discovered that there's too much ground water in the area. I know that when the basement was initially dug, Matt found the high water mark of the pond, then went a couple feet above that for the slab, so that information is about in line with the findings of the sewer installers. They had to end up burying the grinder pump tank about 20 feet from the house, which might modify the landscaping plans a bit, but there's nothing that can be done about that. I don't think it's in the way of the the proposed path, so that puts it in the flower bed, which is fine with me. I'm sure we can find a creative way to obscure it.
Plumbing installation continued with all the drains and many of the supplies installed. There are a few places where we can't avoid drain pipes coming below the height of the ceiling on the first floor, so we'll have to find a creative way to box those in. I'm just glad we only have those few considering the complexity of the house and spread distribution of the bathrooms.
I didn't get a chance to see the tank in this condition, but this is a picture of the tank that Mike sent me before it was put in the ground. I think this one is 84" tall and the top is a couple of feet across. The tank is made of fiberglass and the grinder pump sits inside the tank. I'll try to get more pictures of the inside, but they were working on installing the tank so I didn't get the chance this time.
Here's what the grinder pump tank looks like partially buried. I think there's about a foot or so under ground right now, and they started burying it when we were still there. The only part that will be visible is the large access hatch on top. There's an alarm system to warn of failures, and a redundant, back up pump with multiple check valves. I'm not sure what the maintenance schedule is for this, but I'm expecting every year if not ever other year. You can't be too careful when you're talking about 250 feet of sewage.
This is where the line to the tank connects to the line into the house. You can see the thickness of the footing and the yellow gas line going into the house. They removed the foam on the footing, which I think needs to be replaced since that's part of the "frost free" component of the construction technique. The vertical pipe is for methane venting to atmosphere and it sits well above the level of the basement bathroom drains so we shouldn't have to worry about back-ups overflowing here. The black tape is holding on metallic tracer wire, which runs the length of the pipe to the tank and will run up the driveway along with the sewer and water pipes. It there so can locate the pipes with a detector in the future if we ever need to dig in the area.
Here's how the line connects to the tank. It's all at a slight slope down towards the tank. The lines going over the pipe are for electrical to the transformer and the plywood is there just to hold back the earth so they could work in there. They used up most of the gravel pile from last week in this installation so it looks like they removed more sand than necessary, and back filled around everything with the gravel. It didn't rain recently, so the water in the hole is just ground water, which makes sense since we're right on the lake. Ideally, we would be sitting higher, but the ground is all sand, so I'm not worried about drainage. I guess if the water table rises significantly in our lifetime, it could cause some trouble. The installers commented about the compaction of the gravel base under the basement slab. He was wondering how they passed the compaction inspection, but didn't give any specifics about why they thought it was off. All I know is that the basement prep passed inspection before the slab was poured, so I'm not sure what to make of that comment. There hasn't been any cracks in the basement slab in two years, so I'm not too concerned about it.
Since it was super cold outside, we checked out the inside to try to get some shelter. The construction heater was on, but without insulation on the roof, it was only a few degrees warming than outside. This is the first thing I saw when I came in, and it's pretty unfortunate. Here's the drain plumbing for the turret bathroom on the second floor. Unfortnately, there's no way to get these up higher, and since the foyer opens into the rotunda, there's no wall in line with the concrete beams to run the plumbing down, so they have to cross under the beams into the closest wall. You can see, from left to right, the drain for the toilet, sink, and bathtub with the hot and cold PEX coming through. This bathroom will also have a hot water circulation loop, but they handle it in the wall, as shown in another picture. It's really unfortunate that these pipes had to come down below the ceiling, right in the front entry way, and we'll have to find an elegant way to hide them. Unfortunately, that just means finding a good way to hide the box that needs to be built around the pipes.
Here's the shared wall on the first floor, between the study and the guest bathroom. From left to right is the main plumbing drain stack for the toilet and sink on the second floor, the tub drain, and the water supply for that upstairs bathroom. This is how they do the hot water circulation loop for this bathroom, and I assume the turret bathroom. You can see the two hot water lines are connected 3/4 of the way up the wall so there will only be 8-10 feet of pipe that needs to be cleared until the hot water flows out the tap. Not a big difference considering that this bathroom sits two stories above the hot water heater, but it's still a nice feature to have.
Here's that same guest room bathroom and the second location we'll need to box down to hide pipes. There's probably a reason why they didn't go the other direction with the pipes and avoid going under the beam, but I don't know what it is. So we'll have to box in the area in the shower which is kind of ugly, but at least we have nine foot ceilings so the shower won't feel that much smaller. You can tell they did their best to cram all the pipes in the joist cavity by all the 45 degree elbows in place. They really needed to route the pipes around each other to make it to that wall. From left to right, you can see the stub for the upstairs tub, toilet, then sink, with the cold water supply going to the toilet then sink, followed by the hot to the sink. I think that cold water line should have been taken above the height of the ceiling, and it's only nailed to one of the wood nailers, so I'll have them move it so we don't have to worry about the ceiling in that area.
Here's the drain and toilet stub in that guest room bathroom. This is supposed to be a zero threshold shower, or as close as we can get to it, but considering the height of the drain, I'm guessing it will be like the master bathroom and have a slight lip. I can't tell where the shower head will be in this shower, and we've had some discussion on it but I'm not sure we decided how it will go. If it's on the exterior wall, you have to get in the shower to turn it on, getting blasted by cold water in the process. If it's on the interior wall, you can reach the controls easily enough, but the shower head will be in the shower entry, which might be odd. I'm leaning towards the latter idea, especially if we can pull off a zero threshold entry. It makes more sense to have the water shooting away from the entrance.
Here's the last place we'll need to hide drain pipes in the ceiling, which isn't too bad. This is the mudroom closet, and the pipes are for the master shower drain. The closet ceiling height can easily be brought down and you would never notice the difference. Now that I think about it, the drain for the master tub hasn't been penetrated yet, and I might have some concern about the routing of those pipes. They should be able to run the drain over to the kitchen wall so we don't have any issues with the ceiling in the mudroom, but I won't know that until they penetrate the floor. We have specs on the tub we want, so they should be able to approximate the drain location. One issue is that there's a beam in this ceiling that the pipe needs to run under so something creative will have to happen in this location. I'll have to look when I'm on site, but maybe they can run it forward to the mudroom bathroom interior wall.
Here's the cold water supply box for the fridge. It's a nice little implementation that is often overlooked so the homeowner ends up drilling through the floor and saddle tapping a pipe in the basement for the fridge water supply. Our fridge and freezer are going to be separate units and don't have through-the-door dispensing, but the freezer has an icemaker, and the fridge has an internal filtered water source so this line will need to be split between the two. It looks like there's a little water hammer arrester on the top of the valve, which is nice so you won't hear the water pipes hammering when the ice maker fills.
Here's the curved shower wall and the new penetrations for the water supplies. There are going to be two shower heads and a hand shower, each with thier own controls and mixers, so each needs their own sets of water supplies. At least that what I think is going on. I'm not sure if a single PEX tube can supply three water fixtures full blast, simultaneously. This curved wall will be tricky to attach the shower fixtures to, so I'll probably be posting a lot more of this as it progresses.
Here's the tub location of the second bedroom upstairs and the odd implementation for the drain. I'm not sure about the reasoning behind this, but the stub for the drain here is already part of the drain stack shown in the guest room bathroom picture above. For some reason they penetrated through the floor, and trenched to the HVAC chase. The only thing I can think of is that there will be a vent stack here that goes up the HVAC chase, which will be the vent for the entire drain stack. I don't recall seeing another vent stack in the area, so I'll have to keep an eye out next time I'm there.
This is on the first floor in the chase made by the foyer alcove. I'm not sure what these will be used for, but I'm guessing it will be for the turret bathroom drains since it sits above. They haven't penetrated the floor above this, and the turret bathroom tub has a hole for the drain so I'm not sure what's going on here. Depending on how the walls are placed above, it could be a great place for a basement to attic conduit run for electrical.
Moving to the basement, here's the water supply pipe as it enters the basement slab. They already back filled it with gravel and they were prepping the concrete to patch the floor as we were there. This is where the water meter will sit so near by should be where all the PEX connects. This location is right under a window and the water heaters should be to the right so hopefully we can utilize the wall space on the left for a nice water manifold/junction.
Not much HVAC work was done this week, but the furnace was connected and is sitting in it's final place forever (I hope). It's connected to the supply side and the return side will be connected to where these enormous filters are. I couldn't figure out how to slide these filters out since it looks like the metal flange surrounds the filters on all sides. My guess is that I'll have to open the cabinet to change the filters, and it looks like I'll be buying them in pairs from now on. Since clearance is needed on all sides of the furnace for maintenance, we'll need to push the wall for the future bathroom out a bit. I'm hoping that doesn't mess with the drain locations we already stubbed into the slab.
Here's the furnace from the mechanical room side. The two connection ports on the lower right side are for the geothermal loop and the upper connectors are for the hot water assist or desuperheater. The blower is in the top portion of the cabinet and all the electronics are stored in the bottom.
This might not look like much, but it means a lot. This is the marker for where the already installed sewer tap is, which is located well onto our property! That means no removal of our neighbors grass or trees since it's well away from all that stuff. No need to worry about threading the sewer line around landscaping. One of the biggest headaches just got a little smaller. Even though the builder for my neighbor installed this tap, it wasn't on the city or county records, so they want us to pay for the tap permit on something we didn't install. Mike is trying to fight it but they government wants its money, so we'll be lucky if we don't have to pay.
That's if for this week. I think the sewer and water installation will take a couple weekends to finish, and we'll see how long the HVAC and plumbing takes. We're going into the holiday and hunting seasons, so I think progress will slow a bit, which is good so we have time to iron out the bank details for the build.
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