Photo of the Day

Page Eight

Well, the new year (2004) started off rather interestingly. During the first week, we had the first significant snowfall in about 8 years. First, a storm dumped several inches of wet snow, which then partially melted. A new cold front came in and re-froze what was left of the snow and the standing puddles of melt water, then covered it with a day-and-a-half's worth of freezing rain, turning everything in the Valley into an ice-rind-covered skating rink. In spite of the coating, no major damage to any of the trees in my yard. During weather like this, I stay home and keep the wood stove burning, staying off the roads and out of harm's way.

For the last several weeks, I have been refining the scale drawings of the interior of the bus, making larger scale drawings and trying to get the appliances and fixtures placed within ¼" of where they will eventually be installed. It's time to begin roughing in plumbing, and a misplaced pipe could mean the difference between being able to install a proper width door and having to squeeze through tiny passageways. Here, I'm getting the relationship between the shower, toilet, washing machine and lavatory figured out. Once the interior walls are constructed and the floor coverings (tile, hardwood) are put down, it won't be possible to change the location of the drain stubs coming up through the underlayment.

April 13, 2004: Allright! Now some progress is beginning to show! After taking up some of the floor in the kitchen and most all of it in the bath, I played termite with the hole saw and laid out the maze of drain plumbing you see here. It looks like a lot, but there are two complete systems, one for graywater and the other for black. The original floor of the bus (dark wood on the bottom) rests directly on the frame rails of the coach, so all of the plumbing needed to be in the 7" of sub floor boost so that the pipes could be routed to and fro and still retain the proper slope for complete drainage. What doesn't show in this photo is that the pipes are brimming with water. The outlets of the pipes were capped and the standing water is being used as a static pressure test to detect leaks. Once the insulation is installed in these compartments and the flooring screwed down permanently, there will be no way to detect leaks, much less repair them.

While I was at the locally-owned building materials mega-store, I kind of breezed though the "Bath Boutique" section of the store, casually looking at toilets, shower enclosures, and sinks. They had perhaps two dozen toilets on display, but it was really weird, because they were all on a high shelf, and I could only see the bottom of the bowls from my angle on the floor. Needless to say, from that vantage, they all looked pretty much the same. Once back at home, I Goobled "dual flush toilet", remembering that at one time there was a water-saving can that could be used in a "half-flush" mode. What came back was almost exclusively a line of porcelain thrones made in Australia by Caroma. These crappers have the option of a half flush of .8 gallons for "fluids" or a full 1.6 gallon flush for "solids". Since the bus is intended to be stationary, and connected to a city sewer or rural septic system, I wanted a real flush toilet rather than a "marine" or "RV" can. The possibility does exist (and I am installing dual tanks) that I will spend some time on the road. Being able to conserve water while mobile is important when it comes out of and gets dumped into tanks.

Anyway, to make a fairly insignificant subject even more painfully long, I compared prices of the Caroma unit to those at the building materials place. It turned out that they could special order any of the Caroma units, and even had three on display down on the floor where you could get close to them an at least pretend to imagine what they are like to use. The price on the low-end Tazman unit seemed much lower than any prices I had seen online, so I decided to get one. When the sales associate began writing up the purchase order, we found that the price on the floor display was $40 less than the current list price. Looks like someone forgot to update the signs. Oops, too bad for them, I got it for the old price. So, how do I like it? I don't have the slightest idea, it's still in the packing container in my storage locker, and will stay there until I get the bus bathroom nearly done.

April 17th. I was declaring the "End of Hostilities" when this photo was taken. Mission Accomplished, underfloor plumbing done. I had to take up the floors all the way back to almost the rear axle on the passenger side to extend the supply tubing to just above the location where the fresh water holding tank will be located. This made it necessary to remove some of the insulation that I had installed previously. Most of the plumbing went into sections of floor that I had not insulated in anticipation of needing to work in those areas.

As you see, the supply tubing is in, and has been pressure tested. I used RTI "PEX" tubing for the supplies, both hot and cold. This was purchased at the local plumbing wholesale house. Since the installation is permanent, I used crimp-type clams on the fittings, instead of the screw-on variety. There is a major difference in price. The clamp fittings (such as the 90° elbow) cost about $0.70 each, and the stainless steel bands to clamp them are $0.20 each. The plastic screw-type fittings at the local building materials mega-store were $4.99 each! Of course, since the clamp fittings are intended to be used by a licensed plumber, the crimp tool is $150!!! I could have rented the wholesaler's crimp tool for $35 a day, but instead, I improvised, using an old pair of nail pliers to mostly crimp the band, then finished the job with the blunted jaws of a big pair of bolt cutters, stopping before they cut into the band. No leaks means a job well done!

April 20th. Well, just like another famous "Shock and Awe" operation that has turned out to have complications, I ran into a little insurgency myself today.

I've been putting insulation into the compartments and reinstalling the floor sections over the last few days. I've also been taking careful measurements and have cut many of the holes for the drain and supply tubing to come up out of the floor. While preparing to insulate on of the last compartments, I decided that something didn't look right, the shower drain seemed to be off from where it was marked on the joists. A few measurements confirmed that it was in the correct place fore and aft, but was 9/16" off athwart (look that one up!). This drives me nuts, because I spent hours carefully making and placing a template to transfer the shower drain location to the joists, and even made a jig to hold the drain tailpiece in place while I built the plumbing around it. Obviously, I made some kind of stupid error, and now the drain pipe had to be cut out and repositioned. I won't have any wiggle room on this particular drain, it has to go exactly where it belongs.

Cutting out the drain also meant cutting out the vent, which also must be precisely positioned. In order to position the vent, I needed to install the adjoining plywood flooring sections. When I began putting them in place, I found that I had mis-marked two of them, putting the arrow indicating forward pointing the wrong way. Since I had traced the location of the shower enclosure on the plywood with the laying in reversed position, the marks were now useless to me, and I had to start from scratch. So.... put the plywood back down, screwing it into place using the existing holes (and careful that it was pointing the correct direction), and then lugged the shower enclosure back over, put in into alignment with the marks on the wall and floor sections that weren't reversed the first time, and marked it all again. While I was at it, I stuffed a section of welding rod through the pilot hole in the shower drain to recalibrate my positioning on the drain.

Speaking of which, I'm feeling a little drained myself, the result of too-much-plumbingitis. Maybe next week things will get back to "normal". Riiight.

What's Next? It'll soon be time for electrical rough-in (AC, DC, phone and CAT-5e ethernet cabling. Then the real fun begins, flooring, walls, cabinets and appliances. I've been working (or not working, depending on the year) on this project for 9 years now, it's time to get it close enough to completion to move into it. I'm getting too damned old to live like a pioneer through many more winters.