Kitchen Follow Up

I'm tired

It's been a long morning. Oh, wait, it's the middle of the afternoon now! yikes.

Let's see, where did I leave off?

Oh, right - our contractor sent his guy to buy some tarp to block out the space. He did, he came back, he taped up the plastic barrier in the kitchen. Then, he started to tear down the ceiling.

By this time, the plumber came, and they discovered that the pipes underneath the upstairs condo's kitchen (the one that leaked onto our downstairs kitchen) were very old galvanized steel pipes that had indeed sprung a leak (a small hole) (bad). When he went down to the basement, he discovered that some of the pipes down there had been replaced with newer copper pipes (good). He suggested that rather than trying to replace the galvanized pipes between the floors, he could run new copper pipes outside the house to connect the copper pipes in the upstairs kitchen and laundry room to the newer copper pipes in the basement. This would enable us to disconnect the old galvanized pipes altogether.

We plan to remodel our kitchen(s) someday in the next few years, so it doesn't seem to make sense to tear through the floors/ceilings/beams now until we're ready to do something more permanent in the near future.

Unfortunately, the plumber is booked this week, and he won't be able to do the work until sometime next week.

This means that we won't have any hot water upstairs, and that downstairs looks like a minor disaster with pieces of the kitchen temporarily in every room. (not to mention that I have a hole in the ceiling of my kitchen that is roughly 6' x 6'.)

The beams in the ceiling above the downstairs kitchen are still quite wet, so we need to give them several days to dry out thoroughly. The contractor did a decent job of cleaning up the kitchen once he was done with the ceiling, but I spent another hour cleaning it further so that it would be in good enough shape to use over the next few days. I also took the plastic down so that the room will get more circulation, and will hopefully dry out faster.

Luckily, we do have two hot water heaters, so we will still have hot water (and a full bathroom) downstairs.

So, that's the scoop. It's a bit of a mess, but I do realize that it could have been much worse.