Temporary Irrigation
The irrigation pipes kind of run through where we are putting a shear wall. That was leading the contractors to do all kinds of work around the irrigation, but it has been my plan for a while to redo the entire irrigation system when we finish the renovation (because I've learned a lot from how it is and I'd like to make some improvements). So this weekend we took half a day and moved some irrigation pipes around.
The first thing was that we didn't want to buy any more PVC pipe or any fittings to make this happen. My plan when we redo the piping is to do it in PEX, because that is so much easier to handle. So we took our big box of fittings out and took stock:
This work only affected the indoor manifold; everything outdoors can stay where it is, though of course the circuits that ran through the location of the new foundation have already been removed. I'm not looking forward to the digging to replace those, since it will be largely under the deck.
As part of the renovation work we have shut off several irrigation circuits, mostly because having water appear in those places right now would be problematic. So those circuits Noel just removed altogether. But a few are necessary both to use up tank water and to keep certain plants alive.
We got it down to three indoor circuits, and worked out a plan for re-routing them:
In red, where the circuits ran before. In green, their new route, going around two shear walls (this is a little diagrammatic; they all squish together against the wall there but that just didn't read well) then reattaching to their old runs.
Really, most of the work was figuring out where we could run them with the materials we had on hand and with the least work, and then studying the structural plans to make sure they would not be in anybody's way. They are kind of in the way of the new basement windows going in along the Fern Walk (which is looking really dire right now, but we will get there), but not as in the way as they were going right through the center of that other wall.
As part of the reconfiguring, we got to hang out with our old friends:
The Big Boy, and the Little Big Boy, aka the newer air return duct and the shorter old one we replaced and which we just left in the basement because we could not get it out without crying. Those are GOING AWAY FOREVER in this iteration of the work, so we spent a few glorious minutes tearing ducting apart before we realized we should focus on just gluing pipes together before it got completely dark out.
And that's it. I got so utterly filthy and covered in PVC glue doing this that I just gave up and stopped taking photos. Somewhere in the security camera footage there are probably some great photos of the various moments when we cut pipes and water came shooting out at us. We'll have to do a blooper reel post or something.
In the meantime, we have some temporary irrigation piping and there's more room to work on the structural changes in the basement.
posted by ayse on 06/27/16