As we mentioned in our post yesterday, a lot has transpired lately and we just haven’t taken the time to sit down and take it all in. But we did take photos and there isn’t really much I can do around here with so many workers running all over the place SO it’s a good time to blog and catch up 🙂
On Friday, Macky was supposed to be here but as we’ve mentioned, he never showed. He also never called which was really infuriating. This meant Stefan had to take on the task of starting to lay the plumbing lines in the guest house which was something he really didn’t want to do. Not only did we have no clue what we were doing but if something leaked, then it would all be on our heads which isn’t really the way we wanted to go about it. But you have to do what you have to do, right?
Here you can see Stefan working with his soldering gun. We got this weeks ago with 5 gas canisters for only 14 euros. You just can’t beat that price. We weren’t actually sure we’d need to use it but that was apparently mostly just wishful thinking. Stefan was mounting the shower & sink brackets to the copper piping which was one of the more time consuming parts since there were so many places to weld along each stretch.
These were our finished pieces for 3 shower heads and the sink. Yes, 3 showers. We want the opportunity to have lots of water raining down on us at one and to be able for both of us to be in the shower with our own shower head instead of just sharing one. We’ve now decided against the Kohler Shower Tiles, too, not only because of the price but because it would just be much more complicated to work them in plus getting them too us quickly enough would also have given us some issues. But we found really nice square-headed shower heads at Hagebau the other day which we think are going to look great. We just have to wait another week for them to arrive but they have standard fittings at least which makes things a lot easier.
While Stefan was making headway with the plumbing lines, my task was working with our newly purchased jack hammer. It’s not one of those huge ones that you see construction workers on the street using but is instead about the size of a large drill. It was nicely priced at 60 euros and definitely was a great investment. We needed to enlarge the drain pipe hole which was already in place along the floor of the guest house which would have been a terrible task by hand. It wasn’t even that much fun with the jack hammer since it’s in a rather tight place. This was the view from outside after Stefan got started on it. Once he got sick of the job I offered to give it a go which is when he decided I should be the official jack hammer operator here since I’m better at it. Who knew? 🙂
As you can see it was right on the floor which was useful but since we’d already mounted one of the drywall profiles on the floor it was rather hard to get full access to the hole. So I had to go back and forth, working inside on the floor and then outside while trying to avoid making contact with the bed of manure which is nestled next to the guest house still (any ideas about who might want that stuff are welcome….might have to try freecycle if nothing else!).
After what seemed like an eternity, I finally managed to get the hole over 10 cm wide with additional space for a 5 cm PVC pipe which would be used to run networking cable into the building. The other space is for our water pipe.
As if that wasn’t enough fun already, I decided to clean up the break-through we made earlier for our new walk-in closet. This task was also infinitely easier with the jack hammer than by hand and angle grinder. We’re going to have another task like this at some point when we take out a wall in the former pig stalls so I think we’ll be using our angle grinder & jack hammer a lot in combination there.
As you can see we got most of the wall out already but there was a lot of cleaning up along the sides and on the bottom to be done. We wanted the opening to be 70-71 cm across and then will place a folding or sliding door here (we’re still playing with our options here).
Although it doesn’t look completely even in this photo, I did manage to get it pretty well shaved down and eliminated quite a few places where there were big bulges of mortar left. These were probably the hardest places to work off because there just wasn’t much grip for the hammer to grab onto.
The only thing left now will be cutting a channel through here to run the water heater piping (since we’ll be stashing the water heater here to prevent losing space in the bathroom or bedroom for this).
