Progressing to Pex!

 My friend (who is also a construction whiz) is back from travelling for his job and on Saturday he and his wife came over at noon to help in the next phase of the bathroom reno project.  (cue scary music) The plumbing!  This was not all the plumbing, really just a tip of the plumbing iceberg.  We had to replumb for my washer and dryer in their new location.  We went into the dreaded crawl space armed with humor, a gas torch and rolls of pex piping.  (which is seriously the coolest stuff ever!)  

My crawl space is hideous.  I am about 5ft 7 and I have to kind of crab crawl around it.  Picture the golem looking for his Precious in Lord of the Rings.  Yup, that was me.  For 11 1/2 hours!  Luckily my friend is a good deal shorter than I and could most often mostly stand erect.

It took so long because we discovered most of my existing copper piping was riddled with pinhole leaks.  Leaks I knew nothing about because the pipes were also wrapped in foam insulation.  Which was holding all that water inside.  Yup, right on top of the electric heater tapes that thankfully we didn't use this year.  The goddess was watching over us for sure!

But it meant a lot more replacement than we had expected.  And this does not address the moving of my sink, and toilet or putting in the 2 inch piping for the shower drain (which should be fairly straightforward but then again--this is my house where NOTHING is ever straight forward.)

I am truly blessed with good friends.  They stayed till 11:15 when we were as done as we could be with the job.  The washer and dryer work in their new location which is important. My wife has a cleaning business and we have a large family.  A washer and dryer gets lots of use in our home. 

In the crazy way of doing a project of this scope while living in the space, we will have to move the washer and dryer again when we are ready to lay the subflooring on that side.  Then we will put flooring down and move them back for good. (I hope)

I learned a lot, and it is actually fun using the crimping tool that fastens the pex plumbing.  My friend is a good and patient teacher and I am truly truly blessed with these folks in our lives.  I don't know too many couples who would still be laughing and joking with us when a job took as long as that did.