A milestone

A milestone of sorts was reached last night. One room has been fully drywalled. It hasn't been mudded yet, but we have to celebrate the small achievements where we can.

Getting to this stage for the bathroom actually involved doing a lot more than just finishing one room. It's amazing how many different parts of the house this bathroom touched:

• A new electrical panel had be installed upstairs, replacing the original fuse box (the main panel is still in the basement, but this panel serves the top floor and now the attic)
• A whole new plumbing stack had to be run. While there was nothing wrong with the original cast-iron stack, it's extremely difficult to work with and there are going to be seven new bathrooms to connect. I decided it would be easier to start from scratch.
• The plans called for a bathroom in the attic, and the drains for that bathroom would have to run through this bathroom, so that meant figuring out exactly where the attic bathroom was going so that all of the fixture drains could be run.
• The new plumbing stack had to be vented through the roof
• The existing hot & cold water supply pipes had to be replaced. They were a messy combination of copper, polybutylene, and the original galvanized pipe. I really like the new PEX plastic piping because it's extremely quick to install, so I ended up running new piping all the way back to the water heater in the basement. The new lines service the upstairs bathroom, attic bathroom, and our temporary upstairs kitchen. It took just two days to run all of the piping.

In the end, we didn't just decide on the layout for the attic bathroom, we actually built most of the attic. Our plans now call for at least one dormer, and the bathroom shower will be in that dormer so that it can be a full-height shower. So for now, the shower drain is installed, but no shower yet. The toilet and sink drains are in place, and those fixtures will be installed this summer.

My part in the bathroom is almost complete - I just have to put on the drywall mud. Then Wendy gets to take over doing the tiling on the floor and around the tub. Once that's done, the toilet and vanity can be installed and we'll finally have two bathrooms!