The upstairs. A place where I spend a majority of my time. When I redid the upstairs about two years ago I did not include the bathroom in the phase. I needed to tear out the bedroom below the bathroom so I could have access to all of the plumbing. So I waited.
Recall the start of the bathroom tear out here.
This project turned out to be much more than I anticipated.
Such is life though. In life when we encounter people we only see the outside layers; at least until we get to know them. Humans are pretty complex beings because we know how to hide those deepest layers from the outside. That’s probably not always a good thing.
To recap, I found so many layers in the bathroom tear out. Previous posts talk about that also. The fun part was getting to put everything back together again. If only our lives were that simple. Tear something out, clean it up, and replace. Ha.
As a part of the bathroom update, I was also able to update the plumbing in the entire house. I ended up running PEX home runs back to the utility closet near the well ingress. I decided to rip out or abandon the copper lines running throughout. One main reason for the update is me having to already replace a couple of the copper valves in the old system. I got tired of finding a drip puddle when a valve decided to let go. So those lines are done. I did take out what I could but had to leave others in place. I think I’ve shown pictures of the new PEX manifold system. Here it is just in case I didn’t.
Rerunning those water lines was actually kinda fun. It’s a different way of handling water. Now I’m contemplating adding a water softener into the mix. My skin is taking a beating with this hard water.
Some of the other reno posts cover the progress I made along the way with the bathroom. Let me move on to more pictures of the work in putting this thing back together. Some pictures are repeats over the span of the project.
It’s important to point out, in the midst of completing the bathroom I decided to retire from my day job of Cybersecurity. I had been doing that type of work for 39 years; if you add in the 20 I served in the navy. In some respects as I was rebuilding this bathroom I was also redefining who I was. The many hours, weeks, months I spent working around my schedule to get this bathroom finished helped me make the decision to let the technology job go. And I supposed that is one main reason I moved up north.
Living up north on this homestead was supposed to bring in a very different life. One that reconnects back to simpler things. When I think of all of my nutrition patients over the years and how I often suggested they do what they can to let the stressors in their life go; even job changes and relationship improvements. I finally decided to hear my own advice. Now I can truly model something for my clients that is genuine to me.
I’ll write more on how that’s going. For now the next steps are to finish tearing out the basement bathroom/laundry room. It’s mostly demo’d. I just left the shower, toilet and sink in place while I finished the upstairs bathroom. Technically I could have ripped all of that out as well because I have a full bathroom out in the shop. I just didn’t want to make the mad dash out there in -30 below weather.
Thanks for tuning in. Please comment below with any questions or discussion items.
