Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   another use for that hole
Sunday, October 26 2014
I was so prepared at the Wall Street house today that I never needed to make any runs to the hardware store. I started my work by digging around into a junction in the asbestos insulation where I hoped to find a union fitting on the black iron pipe. But no, it appeared to be NPT thread fittings all the way back to the boiler. The easiest way to take it apart would be to cut through a long length of pipe with a saw and then disassemble it in both directions from there. First, though, I thought it would be good to vacuum up the crumbs of asbestos that had fallen to the floor. I was wearing a respirator as I worked, though I don't know how effective it was (people on the street probably thought I was panicking about Ebola). I started cutting into the pipe with the reciprocating saw, but the moment I'd nicked its it began to spray water at the subfloor overhead. At that point, I didn't want to use a power tool in the spray, so I widened the cut with a hacksaw until it began to gush. Judging from what I managed to collect and what ended up on the floor, at least ten gallons came out of that tiny cut. One advantage to all that spray and water was that it probably washed a lot of asbestos fibers out of the air and down to the floor.
Once I had the pipe out of the way, I turned my attention to carpentry, installing structure in the wall around the square hole in the exterior wall that I'd made for the toilet tank and also in the rectangular through-hole in the closet wall that had been made for the radiator. Obviously a functioning bathroom could not have a one by two foot hole connecting it to a living room. I also cut a small rectangular void in another wall, the one where I'd installed the light switch and the electrical box for an overhead light. This was where I wanted to run the plumbing for a tiny sink I'd ordered.
With a place to run that plumbing, I drilled holes downward into the basement and proceeded to solder the copper pipes necessary to carry the water the final few feet to the little taps where sink and toilet hoses connect. In the course of removing all that unused black iron pipe, I'd gotten rid of the stub of radiator pipe coming through the floor near where the toilet will go. Though it was a little big for this purpose, I could now use that hole for the toilet's water supply.
It was a long day, but I got a lot done.


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