Playing in the dirt

Now that the foundation was done I got to start work. All the underground drain/waste/vent (DWV) plumbing needed to be installed. This consisted of digging trenches placing and gluing the pipe together. Simple, right??? Ok, not quite so simple. First you have to consider where your basement walls and toilets are going to be. Then you have to consider where your upper floor DWV piping is going to be. After all you wouldn’t want to bury a drain pipe in a basement wall only to find it was going to come out in the middle of you bedroom to service the toilet on the upper floor!! So after a lot of planning I started to dig trenches. After 3 or 4 days I had most of the trenching done.

Then it was time to start laying pipe. I first laid out all the fittings and then started cutting everything to length. After working on this for a little while I started to realize that it wasn’t that tough. The big thing to remember when doing DWV piping is that “shit really does flows downhill” and it does it very well at ¼” drop per foot. Once I got that through my head it was really pretty easy. Steve and his dad came over one Saturday and helped me glue up most the pipe. Then I call for the inspection, boy was I nervous. Turns out I had nothing to worry about as I passed with flying colors. The inspector was very nice and willing to discuss questions I had.

Now that I was done it was time for the contractor to finish the ground work. The came back in and filled in and compacted the foundation. Then they laid down a layer of sand, compacting that. Next was the poly sheeting and then the reinforcing wire. At the same time they also shaved the driveway down to get some extra dirt for the back-fill.

Now it was my turn again. One Saturday, with Anne Marie, Steve, his dad Gary, and Joe we laid out all the radiant tubing for the heat. This was real easy, just unwind the tubing and zip-tie it to the wire. After that it was just hook it up to the manifold, put it under pressure, make sure it didn’t leak and then call the inspector back. Again, I passed with no problem.

Now I got to turn it back over to the concrete guys. They came in with the pumper and 3 trucks and poured the floor. Everything went great till the last truck. He got lost! Now normally getting lost is not a problem but when you’ve got a load of concrete in your truck it is a major problem. He finally showed up an hour late. By the time they were pumping the concrete it was starting to set. They really had to push to get it down and finished before it was too late. They got it done but just barely.