In our last post, we were going on about potentially putting in the screed on Friday which is basically one of last big step before we start the finishing touches on the guest house (paint, floor, tile, bathroom fixtures, etc.). BUT we had a rather unpleasant find on Thursday after Macky left when we turned the water back on to the house…one of hot water pipes connected to the heater Macky had just installed was leaking like crazy. The water pressure in the house was actually reduced because so much water was coming out under the wall. Not good.
Here’s where the culprit was in our future shower. It seems some of the temporary fittings set on the shower outputs weren’t totally tight. We had some water there again today and found a small leak that will probably need to be welded again but the water seemed to be drying up when we finished up out there.
This photo was also taken today and has us a bit concerned because there still seems to be a lot of water gathering around this toilet connection. We called Macky and he seems completely unphased about it all so I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes.
Because of the leaks, we pushed back our estrich delivery to Monday and Macky came out again on Friday to fix the problem. I will not go into detail about how long we had to wait for him to finally show up or that we were without water most of the day but we have definitely decided we will need to find some new contractors for our next projects around here…or simply learn to do it all ourselves.
Anyway, yesterday we finally bought the foil and styrofoam pieces to insulate the floor (as well as our floor and wall tile for the bathroom) and today we got to the task of laying the groundwork before the screed/estrich arrives tomorrow morning at 9am. We’re definitely very happy to be closing in on these final steps since we’re getting a bit sick of having this process still underway. But it’s only a few weeks to go now so there’s no holding back.
Since we haven’t posted any photos of our progress lately, we figured it was finally about time.
Here’s our new little water heater. After seeing this thing installed, we’re really happy we decided to create a closet in this tiny space by the wine cellar because it really wouldn’t have fit anywhere else. Underneath it we’ll probably get some sort of drawers for clothes and such and also a small space to hang a few clothes for our guests. You can’t really tell in any of the photos but Covey (our drywall guy) did a really crappy job in here. The room was rather crooked and I’m sure it was a pain to work on, but there are gaps all over the place and he went a bit overboard when filling the holes between the drywall sheets. We have quite a bit of work to do in there before it will really look presentable and be ready for paint…
Our first task of the day was cleaning up all the debris from our construction people and then line the wall with a strip of styrofoam to keep help vibrations from traveling from the floor into the wall. This was the most simple task of them all with the help of our electric staple gun.
Once we’d lined the walls with that, we started laying the 3cm thick pieces of styrofoam on the floor. This task ended up being a bit more complicated than we’d really thought because the room is rather small and we have cables and pipes running EVERYWHERE on the floor. But we finally got the task accomplished with a lot of guesstimating and use of our box cutters and it didn’t look too bad in the end.
After that was completed we laid down a really thick sheeting of PVC foil which the estrich will lay over. Thankfully this also covers up all the strange little pieces we laid in the tiny spaces around the floor so Macky doesn’t look at us like we’re nuts when he shows up tomorrow.
As you can see, we haven’t laid much on the floor in the bathroom yet, mostly because we have no idea what Macky might need access to tomorrow. Plus we want to check the leaks in the morning to see what might have dried up and what still might be an issue.
Macky is supposed to be here bright and early in the morning with our shower drain too which is why we couldn’t lay anything in the shower yet either…but we definitely have more than enough of everything here to do the task. And it shouldn’t take much time for them to cut the styrofoam pieces while we’re shoveling screed into the rest of the room.
It’s really incredible how much warmer the room is already with the styrofoam panels on the floor. We never would have imagined that. In the end we were actually working with our jackets off and without shoes. Before we had the stuff down, our feet would have frozen to the floor. But now it was actually very comfortable – and much easier to work on the styrofoam since you are walking all over it and up and down all the time cutting little pieces to fit here and there.
Anyway, we hope to be good house bloggers tomorrow and do lots of posting with photo updates. We’ve been neglecting our blogs lately for many reasons – but hopefully our renovation funk will be ending and we can start focusing on a few more projects as well – like Christmas decorations 🙂
