Basement plumbing, in-floor heat and walls

It’s been almost exactly a month since they started digging our basement. Every day, it looks more and more like a home.

And since our last update, there’s been lots of progress.

First up, plumbing in the basement and garage. We are lucky to have a licensed plumber to help us with this work. While Ryan and his dad have a great deal of experience, it’s always nice to have that additional expertise. And Ryan said he’s learned a lot.

The first step was digging a really deep trench to connect the house to the septic. Ryan said this will make a man out of you. (I sat out of this exercise and let Ryan handle this. I’m kind like that.)

And then the dream team worked on the basement plumbing – which involved all the plumbing for a basement bathroom and installing drains.

 

And they did the same in the garage – running all the pipes through to the basement from the septic tank and installing two floor drains. (Which will be a lifesaver for winters when our cars are packed with snow. Or if I washed my car. Which I don’t.)

Once the plumbing was complete and the floors were leveled, our geothermal installers came out to run the in-floor heat. This will provide radiant heat in the basement and garage. It’s a totally separate system from the full geothermal heat and will run from a water heater.

Here’s where all the tubes run in the basement – it will be underneath the stairs and out of the way. 

The installers were very efficient – rolling out the layer of insulation, then wire mesh, and finally the tubing. The tubing was secured down with ties and the concrete will be poured right on top.

The floors are supposed to be poured today (fingers crossed for good weather), but that didn’t stop Ryan, my dad and my brother from getting to work on the basement framing.

It was a bit of a slow start because the lumberyard delivered the wrong plywood and shorted us on some lumber for framing the windows. But the guys still got to work and the right stuff was delivered on the next business day. Here’s my dad working on the walls. He likes it when I snap photos of him.

Slow and steady, the walls started going up.

It has been pretty steamy while the guys were working, but they kept at it. (You can see all of our lumber and floor trusses were delivered here.)

The basement has two exposed sides and tons of great big windows. They are almost as large as the windows upstairs. The basement won’t initially be finished, but with these windows, I think it will be such a great space when it is.

Once the walls were up, the guys sheeted everything with 1/2 inch plywood. The plan was to do this while building the walls, but since the plywood originally wasn’t correct, it was done in two steps. 

Henry has been a huge help. He loves “marking” everything with his contractor pencil. He’s also a champ at stacking all the 2×6 scraps.

Now we’re just waiting for the concrete floors to be installed before we hit the ground running. After installing the floor trusses, the walls upstairs will be a huge job. They are basically built as one wall (at 15 feet) instead of two separate walls, so Ryan has been planning and getting ready for that.

Should be a fun couple of weeks while we see our house rise from the ground. Literally.