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by Josh Baltzell.
Original Post: A Nerd's guide to buying an old house - Utility Room v0.8
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I wanted to get some pictures up from my new home that I purchased nearly two months back. We did a lot of work to the home and it has gotten to a livable point again finally.
What I am going to do is explain what we did in each room one step at a time for two reasons. One reason is that I want an easy way to remember these things so that in 20 years when my wife is saying "Remember how that piece of wood had to be cut lengthwise to fit it in the the wall behind the water heater?" or something ridiculous and specific I can just call up this article on my super pod heads up display and re-import the data in to my Wifetalk Digital Storage Coprocessor "For easy, automated and unconscious conversation, even when you are really watching TV" (So I am imaging the future being just as chauvinistic as it was years ago. Everything I learned about the future I learned from the Jetsons).
So to get it started I decided to write up a little something about the utility room. This room is not finished, but it seems like it was the biggest improvement to me even by just fixing the floor. Below are some pictures that I will explain shortly just to give you an idea of what the floor was like before we started.
For this post I am just going to explain what you are seeing and then later I will explain the process. In the picture above on the left you are seeing an old style floor drain that was being used for the washing machine. The washing machine was literally on stilts to make it level and all the pipes and concrete were visible. It sort of created a focal point in the room where you don't want a focal point (I don't know what any of those words mean, I have been forced to watch trading spaces in the past and I have determined that these are the words that you use when describing a room.)
In the picture on the right we have removed the carpeting, but not the pad. The hole was in the process of being fixed. What we did was we chipped in to the concrete all the way to the wall to have room to put a new pipe under the level of the floor. When that was done we installed a new pipe (and when I say installed I mean we paid someone) and then covered the entire apparatus with concrete.
After everything was as flat as we could get it we drained the hot water heater, took out the toilet (more on that in a minute) and installed the snap together wood flooring that is so popular these days. From the picture above on the right you can see that covering the hole was a big improvement.
That is all I have for this post. After we paint and finish the rest of the room I will post some more details.
One last note though. Below is a picture of the most important thing a nerd can upgrade in an old house.
Spanking new electricity gizmos! In fact do like I did, I have new wires from teh pole to teh box, a new breaker box and all new outlets.
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