Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Plans finished!

The plans are officially ok!

I just need to get the layout right and have them signed by the architect. The architect also promised to get the official site plan and deed record by today and mail it to me. So once I get that and the plans signed we're ready to submit them!

Firday 11th we lined up suppliers and contractors to give us quotes, the construction supply house, a framing contractor and a plumber.

Most likely we'll leave the old concrete floor as far as possible, based from what is visible from outside this is a 15 or 20cm slab, possibly even with rebar. Unfortunately it is fairly sloped (to make sure any animalic liquids run out into the manure pit in the yard), so we have to see how far above ground we'll get. We need to build up at least 7cm above the highest spot of the current floor.

Aside of that I finally managed to get most of the tools out of our Vienna hallway where they'd been residing ever since we finished the last room in 2005 and into the new shop shelf. We definitely need to de-trash all other shop storage though... the new shelf is bursting and there's still enough stuff on the floor and any other horizontal surface.

Not so good: our 30 year old boiler in Vienna gave up the ghost late Saturday night. It had been dripping occasionally for almost 2 years, but once the pressure had dropped a little againa fter refilling it had worked, so we ignored it. Besides, we thought it was just an external valve, underneath the wall-mount unit.
Then my mom said the boiler wouldn't fire up. So my dad grabbed the fill hose at 12.30 Saturday night... or rather Sunday...
Suddenly he cursed and I ran to see what happened. The boiler wasn't dripping any more, it was running. And worse, the water was coming from inside the boiler!
The last plumber who serviced the unit had put the cover on so securely I couldn't get it off... don't ask me what he did.
We put a bucket under the unit to catch the water, grabbed a few extra blankets and went to bed.

The enxt morning much to our surprise it was nice and warm... the beast had held enough water to run!
That held until yesterday in the evening. My dad had eft the hose connected anyway, so he just needed to turn up the water a little and add just enough pressure the boiler would start.

We also got a plumber lined up for Thursday. Most likely he'll tell us to get a new boiler... but we hope to convince him of repairing it, maybe be using a band aid approach.

After all the boiler (which only heats our unit) is supposed to be replaced by a whole house pellet boiler next year, so we'd like to keep it running until then.

Wish us luck!

No comments: