Big House - first strike

The true first task was removing the collapsing, leaking, molding water heater out of the big house last night!!!  Or I should say Roger got it out, I just mopped up after wards.  You see, it was completely full of water and sinking into the rotting floor.  He couldn't get a hose to attach to the nasty, rusty valve in order to drain the 40+ gallons of water, so he just muscled it up and out, tipped that grody thing down and wheeled it out on an appliance dolly, sloshing and splashing all the way.  That's my man.  We figured 40 gals x 8 lbs per is 320 lbs of water plus the weight of the sediment and the water heater.  By the time it was done, it was too dark for a photo op but I'll try and get one tonight.  Wait till you see the closet it came out of - YUCK!!!

The water heater was the reason we decided to move out while we ruminated on what to do with the big house.  It's a gas water heater and when we noticed it was sinking into the floor and the boards under it were getting white and powdery (mold), we knew it wasn't a good situation.  I was afraid of the gas pigtail starting to leak if the water heater sank and there's just no good ending to that story.  Then when we got the water heater out and discovered the nest of pipes DIRECTLY under it, we would have had one hell of a catastrophy.

This weekend we will start taking down the plumbing wall so we (a term that will be used loosely throughout this adventure, but it's mostly "he") can replace the plumbing that was installed somewhere between 1938 and 1950.  I figure there's a little more than a string's width of water coursing through those 1" pipes -- the rest is occupied by the red, oozy matter. 

The walls are lathe and plaster - oh joy.  There's not even enough room in that "closet" to swing a sledge hammer so I don't know how fast/slow the demo will go on that.  I do know it's not like breaking drywall.  The heater (which is slightly smaller than a Volkswagen) also lives in there with the water heater.  The master bedroom closet is on the backside of the plumbing wall.  Hmmmm.  Maybe the closet will need to get a little smaller.  A nice armoire could suffice in lieu of, right?

The floor is a completely different matter.  Wood with a dirt lining and no crawl space --- oh, and Roger says most of the water lines for the house all run under the water heater.  He will probably have to re-plumb everything.  Notice I did not say 'we' this time.  My friend Lynnie says she wanted to be a plumber, but she's an internationally known fusing and bead artist.  Be still your heart because she will be teaching here at some point, she promises.  Still, I may call on her to come assist on plumbing matters from time to time.  It's always good to have a fall back vocation and she should keep those skills sharp.

Roger has a meeting at work tonight, so I will go back out and take some pics to document the 'before'.  Those 'befores' are going to be really important so we can all be reminded of just how far we've come.

I also hope to take a walk around the cotton fields tonight before it gets dark.  I miss that.  I think we figured the perimeters of two fields is about a mile.

Until later, Gators...