About a year and a half ago I started telling the story of how we have this house and we are turning it into a completely different house, one piece at a time.

My first goal in remodeling our house was to accomplish a recommendation from our home inspector: replace the old galvanized water pipes with pex. The basement was finished so that meant tearing out the ceiling in order to get to the pipes. So that's what I did.

Over the course of a couple of weeks I sawed and hammered and ripped and tore hundreds and hundreds of pounds of old finished ceiling and walls apart to get to a bunch of rusty pipes.

There was so much old duct work in the way of the water pipes that I tore that out too. When I was done, the ceiling was empty and we had neither drinking water nor an HVAC system. I installed new water pipes immediately.

It was July, so I had some time to figure out the HVAC thing. I decided that since I had already torn apart the ceiling that it would be a good idea to install a radiant floor heating system. I still maintain that this was a good idea, but it was a lot of hard work. Thankfully my retired parents had nothing to do so they did most of the work for me. Thanks mom and dad!

That's what occupied much of my free time through that first summer. I'll show you some pictures of dirt in my next house post.

House Blog, Part 4