I've noted that I have so many projects going on that I live "in the projects." Actually, it's a nice house, but natually, it wasn't quite how we wanted it when we moved in, so my wife and I have undertaken a few projects to improve its suitability for us.
The laundry room saga has been mentioned on this bulletin board several times over the past year, but to recap, our house has a laundry room in the basement. It is basically a long hallway going behind a bathroom, which then has a niche for the appliances to the right side. In the far right corner is a thing called a sump, which is basically an ugly hole in the floor with a leaky plastic bucket set into it. It is used to collect water, mostly from an outdoor stairwell that goes to a doorway into the basement. Water is supposed to disperse from the sump into the soil around the house, but in some cases, too much water enters, and there is a pump with a float valve that will pump it out into the yard. It's ugly, and one problem that we had in the house is loss of electrical power when the weather turned bad.
The niche for the appliance had a laundry sink right in the middle of it - between where the washer and dryer were installed. I don't know who thought the idea of symmetry was more important than convenience, but I thought it was just plain dumb to have it there. Also, the water supply for the sink was tapped off the supply for the washer with hoses, which I felt was tacky.
So there's the original situation: A big ugly wet hole in the floor, and a sink in a most obnoxious location. So, being too ignorant to realize just how much I was biting off, I decided to rearrange the furniture.
There is a four-wide cabinet mounted above the appliances, which had to be removed for me to get to the wall behind it and mess with the plumbing. That came off pretty easily, so I felt confident to continue. There was also a soffit surrounding the cabinet, made of drywall on steel studs, and that was pretty easy to turn into dumpster fodder. When I took off the layer of drywall covering the plumbing, I found several generations of construction, and since I also wanted that wall to be fairly soundproof (since my media room is on the other side of it), and since it wasn't a load-bearing wall, I decided to knock the whole thing down and do it my way.
I had to be reasonably careful of the plumbing and electrical while I was demolishing the wall, but all that came out without a problem. I put in studs, staggered and offset for sound isolation. I was able to reuse some of the studs I had removed, but since it was originally a haphazard setup, not much wood was long enough. Maybe it'll go into the fireplace.
I've done plenty of plastic drain pipe and plastic irrigation pipe in the past, so reworking the drain was pretty simple. I've also done a moderate amount of sweating (soldering) copper supply lines, but when we moved from California, I sold off my blowtorch, so I bought a new one - GOOD IDEA. That made sweating the supply lines a piece of cake.
During that process, though, I had to shut off the water to the house, and one time I tried to turn it back on, the valve wouldn't work. It was a gate valve, and the stem pulled out of the gate. The valve was VERY hard to turn anyway, so getting a new one was one more improvement. Fortunately, I was able to turn off the water at the meter, and the pipe with the valve was removable with a union on one end and a plastic coupling on the other, so I could set it up horizontally while I installed the new valve.
Some of the issues I faced while working on this part of the project were keeping the washer and dryer available for use, in spite of all the construction. Except for the time when the valve to the house broke, up to this point, we always had the appliances available when I stopped working at night. I had to replumb the supply for both the washer and the sink (keeping hot and cold on the correct sides), I had to replumb the drains for both the washer and the sink, I had to rewire the outlet for the washer, and I had to rewire the 220V outlet for the dryer. I also had to keep a dryer vent coupling available.
