The Can of Worms

This summer was meant to be the summer of foundation repairs and plumbing.  But as anyone whose ever done a renovation before knows one thing ALWAYS leads to another.  Have a look at the plumbing process...I'm sure many of you can relate.

• Have the exact floor plan for the basement suite laid out and marked on the floor prior to roughing in the basement.
• Expose the plumbing throughout the house
• Have the layout of all the plumbing we want run/ changed on the main floor decided even though we aren't doing main floor renos just yet because once we drywall the basement ceiling it will be difficult to get to... So we may as well do it now! Which means we need to:

•  Design the kitchen

2x6 WOD

• Frame the basement to run the waterlines.  Which means we need to:

• Design a new staircase that allows for the minimum required headroom (so we know where to frame on that wall)
• Move the existing electrical (as it runs under some of the floor joists and is in the way)
• Build the stairs
• Order windows to ensure the framing is done correctly for the size of the new windows
• Install the window headers (a few joists are resting on the windows)
• Move the duct work in order to allow access to the furnace room
• Have a game plan for the duct work

So that's what we've been working on for the last little while... The framing process was interesting.  We had a lot of obstacles to face through the process which equals time.  A few weekends ago we had a bunch of great friends and family (thank you UR, Ju, D & N, D, C) come over to help us frame and at the end of the weekend and it was called One Weekend One Wall...  As that was all we had completed by the end of the day Sunday (although we did have a lot of the other walls close to completion).

The far wall was the product of One Weekend One Wall!  Check out the waterlines on the beam - beauty!

The duct work / furnace issue has been the craziest.  Originally our plan looked like this:

•  Keep the existing furnace / duct work for the main floor and abandon the heat runs to the basement
• Purchase a second furnace / install duct work for the basement suite (Code here requires that we have separate heating and ventilation systems) - Prior to making this decision we had explored electric baseboard heaters, in floor heating, and a few other options but decided this was the way to go.

When we were having the concrete poured in our basement we took out the furnace, as we knew we would be moving it anyway it just made sense to get it out of the way.  I realized a couple weeks ago that I made an error in the design of the basement suite because I had the door to the furnace room underneath the existing duct work.  The door height needs to be min 78" which would have been impossible with the location of the current duct work.  The plumbing has already been roughed in and the concrete poured so we can no longer move things around very much and unfortunately there was no other place that we could put the door. And because our current heat ducts are all in the center of the house on the main floor we have to crank the heat to get heat to the exterior walls...  So, we decided we may as well get the ducting run to beneath the windows and by the doors on the main floor while we have everything open up anyway.  That seems to be the recurring theme... While it's open we may as well do it all!  Haha!  So I've had a few furnace/ ducting guys out to give me some quotes and ideas.  The first 2 guys looked at the obstacles in the basement...

• Low headroom as is - 80" from concrete to bottom of floor joists
• Support beam that runs in the center below the floor joists that goes down 7"
• We can only run duct work on the east side of the beam to allow for the door
• It's a small space - just under 600 sq feet
• Aesthetic requests - I want to have the narrowest possible bulk head

 ... And told me that I should really consider electric baseboard heaters for the basement.  So I explored them and did the heat loss calculations and learned all about HRVs and talked it over and priced it out... and decided to go with the second furnace.  Luckily we had D help us out by getting creative and thinking outside the box and a game plan for the duct work was created.  We had a couple more guys come out to give us quotes and hopefully we'll get them all back soon and book this job as it's starting to get cold!

Here are our latest accomplishments... We finished framing 80% of the basement, we abandoned all the old waterlines in the entire house and ran new ones throughout! 

Progress

Pex - You have such a clean look!