Leaps and Bounds

So our last post was a while ago. In that time, Jennifer and I visited Africa (more to come on that). I spent a week working in Chicago...and Duncan and his Magical Artisans continued chiseling our home into a gem. Lots has happened. The new lead-free water line came in from the street. And that meant no more filtered water...and a major excavation on the front yard.

We've blocked the street a lot over the last few months.  

New lead-free water lines running from the city into the house.

New line coming from the street into the house.
We can finally drink direct from the tap!

This happened the day we were leaving for Africa. You can imagine the state we were in...hopping a plane for 20 hours, leaving our two children behind, and allowing workers to dig up our front yard without us present. You could say we had a lot of faith in Duncan. And of course, everything went off perfectly.

The basement underwent major remodelling. All the plumbing was stripped out and tucked into the ceiling. When we demoed the place, the plumbing looked like this:

You can see all the pipes running just below the ceiling. And of course those two big pipes that run right out in the open...they were buried in a wall. Stu came in and stripped it all out and wove the pipes into the ceiling gaining us significant head space. Yay Stu!

You really can't tell from this photo but it shows how much digging and tunneling was needed for the plumbing overall. It was a big job.

Plumbing for the new basement bathroom

Once the plumbing and excavation was done, next step was gravel...to get us ready for pouring concrete.

A conveyor belt was brought in to run
all that gravel to the basement.

After that big job, the team moved on to pouring the concrete. Unfortunately I don't have any great photos of that...it happened while we were in Africa. But Stu proposed a way to heat the floor by running pipes under the concrete. We weren't there to make a call so Duncan made an executive decision to go for it. And now we will have a heated concrete floor. Nice.

You can see the lines run for heating the floor.

Lots more to update. I'm still not current. Expect more shortly.