Pulp Bath 1 Reno

Weekend 9 of Pulp Bath 1 Reno complete and we did what we had set out to do….close up the walls! Challenges along the way? Oh yeah, but we got there.

Challenge number 1? Making the plumbing tight. Sounds simple, right? Well…not always so. Do tell, you say? So, as we’ve been doing, using PEX (look it up) for our water runs, and absolutely no problems with that, love the PEX! It was the transitions from PEX to the shower valve, essentially pipe fittings that you connect to and are threaded into the shower valve/shower spout. With most plumbing, I prefer to be tight but not too tight (leaves no room for correction), however, that can be a very fine line. You see, the fittings have to point in the right direction in order to connect to them and sometimes tight tight isn’t the direction you need so you have to feel it out. And in our specific case, tight wasn’t tight enough! In a nutshell, had everything piped in and connected, lines and shower valve secured, turned the water on and, oh no, two tiny drips on the water feed into the valve and the feed out to the shower head. Simple tighten up, correct? Well, oh no, again. The only way to tighten those two fittings was to disconnect it from the PEX lines (which is the one thing PEX isn’t that great for, it’s made to stay on). So, cut the lines we did, added a little more teflon tape to the fittings and got slightly more aggressive on the tightening. Added a couple PEX couplings with new pieces of PEX tubing and went for it again. It worked, no leaks this time, all good to close up!

Challenge number 2, did I mention that the room itself is slightly sloped? Yes, old house and all, slight pitch in from the outside (meaning outside wall is a little tighter than the inside one) also meaning not square so our Go Board/sheetrock walls have to adjust at the top (aka, leave a little room up there to be able to land it and not have to beat it in taking the chance of breaking it up on the top edge). Okay, did a little beating with the mallet and a flat board, on occasions, just to ease some pieces into final position, for the most part, we are clean and fairly tight, no real worries as we’ll be filling in the seams and patching as needed. Good to go.

Walls closed up and onto the patch today, after picking up some supplies and doing a little pre-shopping for the upcoming Pulp Pavillion project (we’ll be revealing that one at a later date)!

Progress pics below, hope you enjoy and we’ll see you next week!