Plumbing

Once again it has been way too long since I added anything to this blog. Luckily, we have not been idle and there is much to talk about. We have recently finished and passed our inspection on what I refer to as the "Holy Grail" of house remodeling... Plumbing. Plumbing...hmm...an odd choice maybe. However, I understand and can whole heartily endorse the cost of a plumber. Personally, I think it has been the most challenging and at sometimes the dirtiest job we have had to do. At the end of the installation, we replaced all of the plumbing on the west end of the house; drain pipes and supply pipes. We used copper for all of the supply lines. To quote a favorite movie "Copper...it cost's money because it saves money". I hope this is true. Although we replaced our plumbing in Austin with the new fandangled plastic piping, we had second thoughts about doing it for this house. For the DWV piping, we used ABS. If I had unlimited resources, I would have had someone else do it and used cast iron. ABS is pretty easy to work with, but it is noisy as hell. New photos have been added to the blog to show some of the work.

Structure Work Finished

The crew at the Hill House recently finished the structure work for the new bathroom. To meet the new codes for a bathroom (40#'s per sq ft), we had to add four new beams to the west side of the house. We added new glu-lam beams (4x10) to the upstairs "knee" wall and then ran 4x4 posts down to the basement. These beams take the load of the roof off of the second story floor. Then we added two solid 4x10 beams under the 1st floor bathroom walls. These new beams turn the existing first floor bathroom walls into load bearing walls which will support the second floor bathroom. We couldn't have done the work without Jon's friend, Damian. For the low cost of fajitas and beer, he spent the afternoon with us helping us to place all of the beams. There aren't as many photos as I would have liked. With only the three of us, it made picture taking difficult. For the glu-lams which went into the second floor, we had to lift them on to the roof and bring them through the middle skylight. All and all, a very successful event. See pictures under Structure Work Finished.

Structure Work Begins

After a surprisingly busy fall for both Jon and I, we are back to working on the new bathroom. We went through the official permitting process with the city. This was a little scary at first since it looked like we might have to do some major work to the house to get the upstairs classified as a livable space. However, we luckily were able to get the upstairs grandfathered in as livable space since it had obviously been used as such for many years. This means we do not have to redo the stairway up to the second floor (plus various other things).

Since we are installing a new bath, we do have some modifications to make. The biggest one of these is adding structural support. We got a wonderful architect to help design the bathroom, do our drawings for the permitting process and to design the new structural support. His name is Jacob Chavez (jchavezdesign@gmail.com). Jacob was great to work with and has become one of our new friends here in Portland.

Because of the new footings for the new support beams, Jon and I recently had to reroute the main sewer pipe. We did a lot of pre-work and the rerouting actually went very smoothly. I highly recommend getting a orbital Sawzall with a metal cutting blade encrusted with diamonds (Blade - $15 at Homey D) for this type of work. It cuts through cast iron like it was butter. We also recently constructed forms for the footings and just got them officially inspected by the city yesterday. We will pour concrete and finish up the support work after the holidays. See the slide show on the recent work.

The Dynamic Duo

Whitney and Jon's parents (Richard and Mary Anne Tirrell) recently spent a couple of weeks with us. They came to work and work they did. We built a fence, stripped wall paper from three rooms, and painted three rooms. We were amazed at how much we all accomplished. It couldn't have happened with out Richard and Mary Anne. Many, many thanks goes out to them. You can view much of the process and finished work in the slide shows adjacent to the blog.

Finding the House

Whitney and I moved to Portland in the middle of May. We started looking at houses right away. We thought we would buy something quickly, but that didn't happen. We found many goods deals, but after 5 or 6 offers we still hadn't bought a house. We had recently decided to focus our search in one area of North East Portland. I was looking at houses on the MLS listings and came across the house we were soon to buy. I biked over to check it out (without our realtor who was meeting us that afternoon) and immediately loved it. It needed lots of work, but I could see the potential. I met Whitney for lunch (she was studying for the bar) and we checked the house out again. She also liked it and we looked forward to checking it that afternoon. When that afternoon came, our realtor, Adam Rust, called and said that another buyer was just signing the papers on the house. I was really, really, bummed. We went ahead and looked at a couple of other houses and even made an offer on one. I wasn't very excited, but we needed to find a house.

The next day, I was hiking in Forest Park with the dogs, when Adam called. Apparently, the previous buyer just backed out and the house was back on the market. We went and checked it out. After a short discussion over beers and french fries at our local pub, The Moon and Sixpence, we decided to make an offer. Of course, everything worked out and we got the house (it wasn't quite that simple, but...). I took a bunch of photos and emailed them to Whitney's brother, Jon, who was going to be living with us. He does remodeling and carpentry work for a living. When I sent him the pictures, he also loved it so we knew we were doing the right thing.

Portland Beginnings

Well, this blog has been created to keep our friends and family up to date on our new/old house modifications as well as anything else in our lives that we want share. The current residents here are Kurt Hill, Whitney Tirrell Hill, and Whitney's brother, Jon Tirrell. Jon is living with us and helping to remodel the house. He has the know how and all the cool tools. It will probably be mostly pictures, but who knows...more to come.