July 05, 2005
"Towards a 2BR" Part III: I Was Framed
filed under: Demolishments and Renewvations[If you haven't read Part II, click above or scroll down - this one will make more sense in context.]
Day 7, Saturday: It was time to start framing the new wall, doorways and closet - which gave me an excuse to FINALLY, FINALLY buy a new roofrack for the car (yay Thule!). I pillaged Loew's for lots of steel track and stud, dropped it off at home, and headed out to see a friend's show. On the way, I had an idle thought: "Huh," I thought, idly, "I suppose there's always the slightest possibility that my brilliant plumbing might have a little drip or two. I should probably check before I build around it."
So I tracked down our super and asked him to turn the system back on when he had a chance. You know, if he got around to it. No big deal.
I got back from the show and prepared to start framing. Suddenly I heard the rush of water in the heater pipes. "Huzzah," thinks I, "now I get to watch my beautiful joints hold water!"
And so they did.
For about thirty seconds.
It started with a slight hiss. "Hm," thinks me, "that doesn't sound right." Sure enough, there was the teeniest, tiniest little puddle forming under the joint at the very end of the baseboard run. "Damn," I thought, "it drips. Now I'm going to have to pull that joint and re-do it. Well, at least the rest are holding!"
Another hiss to my left. Where I had, at great difficulty, run the pipes behind the existing wall.
A big hiss.
As I hurried over it became clear that it was, in fact, several hisses. The puddle they made was neither teeny nor tiny. I grabbed the dirty t-shirt that was sitting in the room and threw it down to sop up.
Another hiss. From the first joint I had done, the bendy straw part. Water sheeting out from the bottom 1/4 of the joint. "HONEY!" I called out, somewhat desperately. "TOWELS! NOW!"
"Laundry room" shouts Lisa, and I bolt to the basement. Where I am greeted by the sound of water dribbling across the ceiling and down the wall.
God. Damn. It.
Back upstairs I throw armloads of towels at the floor and sprint for the building's main entrance, to get the super to turn the god damned water back off again.
So.
If anyone needs an in-wall sprinkler system put in, give me a call. I'm uniquely qualified.
I will say in my defense that, out of 22 or so joints, only five or six failed. So, you know. I got about 80% of them right.
It had occurred to me as I finished up the plumbing job originally, that I could have saved a lot of trouble if I had simply removed the studs I was running behind - which would have meant removing that whole section of wall and re-doing it later, but would have made life much simpler on balance. With my whole plumbing job in shambles and needing to be re-done, I realized that this was the best option, and in the heat of the moment started slicing open my wall with the punch saw.
I got about seven feet up before it hit me: there was no reason to run the pipes in the wall anyway. I could just run them straight, and sure it wouldn't be as fancy and they'd be exposed inside the closet, but on balance WHO GIVES A F***.
So now (a) I had to pull out all my nice plumbing and start from scratch, and (b) I had just cut a seven foot gash in my wall for no reason.
I abandoned the saw and went to have a good sulk.
More below...
We're blessed with eleven-foot-three-inch ceilings, which is great for space but a bitch for getting things measured properly. Steel stud walls consist of track at the top and bottom, with stud vertically between them - but the track has to be perfectly aligned above and below for the wall to run straight. It took me most of the day to get the various track locations plotted out evenly on the ceiling and floor.
And then I discovered that, on the ceiling, the supports ran parallel to the new wall location, meaning there was nothing to attach the track to but bare drywall, which as we discussed early ain't the sturdiest stuff in creation. So I had to cut holes between ceiling supports and put steel splints in place between them, to screw the track to:
We had friends coming over that evening, so by the end of Day 7 all I had created was this much framing:
...and the urgent desire to shoot myself over the catastrophic failure of my plumbing.
Day 8, Sunday: One week in, and more framing. Due to the casual regard in which the original builders of our apartment held things like right angles, I discovered that measuring from the floor up did not actually guarantee something would be square and true - in fact, quite the opposite. I eventually discovered that the proper approach was to measure one end, attach that, and then just use a level to figure out where to attach it at the other end.
Eventually, the whole wall and closet was framed:
I noticed during the course of Day 8 that I lose my mind a little bit when I work for too long. I tend to forget to put on the radio, and find myself compulsively repeating snatches of songs, out loud, over and over. Today it was a song from They Might Be Giants' Here Come the ABC's, a lilting, melodic little ditty called "Can You Find Them?" which somehow I re-lyriced to:
Give me S-N-O-O-P
To the D-O-Double-G
Can you find them? Can you find them?
This led directly to Max tromping about the house crying out "f'shizzle ma nizzle!" but we won't get into that.
Day 9, Monday: Took the wife and child to Lowe's where Lisa got to observe firsthand my patented method for learning how to do all this renovation stuff:
1) I find the aisle that has the stuff you can buy to do what I need to do;
2) I pick up some things that look interesting, and read the labels;
3) I pick up some other stuff and read those labels;
4) I go into some weird kind of a trance where I stand perfectly still, looking distant and dazed and muttering to myself, for up to ten minutes.
Eventually, by some weird osmotic hundredth monkey kind of process, I figure out what I'm supposed to do, and which of the various things I need to buy to do it.
It's a good thing I warned her that this was how I rolled at Lowe's, or she'd have thought I'd gone bonkers.
We brought home our new ceiling fans, and the dimmers and switches to run everything (which are, for no good reason, WICKED EXPENSIVE), and I set about finishing the framing.
I had to chop up our existing entrance wall to put in the new two-doored alcove:
Finally, everything was framed - the entrance alcove, the two doorways and the soffet above, and the new wall with our closet and storage loft:
A nice side benefit of using steel stud is that it looks all sleek and shiny and hi-tech, and by the time all the parts are in place it looks pretty swanky:
Here is the whole framing process, over Days 7, 8 and 9:
Max celebrated by running from "his" room into "ours," through the closet, shouting "own woom! OWN WOOM!" Which helps make the whole thing feel worth it.
Posted by rjt at July 5, 2005 03:55 PM