Water woes
The last entry documented changes we made back in the late 1990s: since that time, there were a string of circumstances that kept us from doing more house updating. In the early 2000s, unexpectedly, the process went from a "we" project to a "me" project, which meant there were suddenly limits on both time and money. There were issues with water getting into the basement (seeping through walls) that are influenced by the fact that my neighbor's house channels all its runoff rainwater right around the base of my house, so there's a very slow ongoing project to install drain tile around the house. It's helping some, but with the project half done it seems like that, unless I re-grade both my yard & my neighbor's yard, I'll have to have a sump pump installed to keep the basement dry. Until then, I just have to deal with water in the basement when heavy (more than an inch a day) rains hit. The house also had other ideas for itself as well: in 2003 it decided that its Christmas present to me was a new gas furnace (ouch on the cost but hooray for higher efficiency than the 1960s monster that expired).
In 2005, the house gave me new first-floor plumbing for my birthday (the old galvanized pipe started springing leaks everywhere). Instead of replacing old galvanized line with PVC or copper, the plumbers used PEX (cross-linked polyethylene) tubes: it's handy for replacing old plumbing because it comes in long (1000') lengths (fewer joins over long runs), it's flexible (can bend around joists & things), faster to install, and reports mention that PEX doesn't conduct heat like copper, so your hot water lines lose less heat with distance from the hot water heater. I also like that the hot water lines are red and the cold water lines are blue (it does look sort of cartoonish when you first see it, but hey, it's code-compliant and actually seems to be a major improvement over metal & PVC). You do have to support the lines since they're not rigid, but it's not that difficult & the PEX was easy to run through the existing holes cut in the floor joists that the old galvanized lines ran through. Kitchen got new plumbing, but the bathroom was not replumbed (the shower access was blocked by too much junk and is something either I can do or one of my home construction buddies can do - PEX rocks!), and the bathroom sink, well, um, there is no access to the plumbing behind the sink where the service lines run. To open it up you either go through the tile on the bathroom wall or through a pretty bad plaster wall in a bedroom. Since that's on the long list of home repairs to eventually complete, I thought I'd leave that level of plumbing for the time that wall comes down (those plans are for future entries). And yes, nothing has been done for the upstairs plumbing, but it would have been another couple thousand dollars I didn't have free at the time, and since there isn't good access to the upstairs plumbing I though it would wait until I have the chance to actually build intentional access points rather than using a sledgehammer & recip saw to make access points when they were needed.
In 2005, the house gave me new first-floor plumbing for my birthday (the old galvanized pipe started springing leaks everywhere). Instead of replacing old galvanized line with PVC or copper, the plumbers used PEX (cross-linked polyethylene) tubes: it's handy for replacing old plumbing because it comes in long (1000') lengths (fewer joins over long runs), it's flexible (can bend around joists & things), faster to install, and reports mention that PEX doesn't conduct heat like copper, so your hot water lines lose less heat with distance from the hot water heater. I also like that the hot water lines are red and the cold water lines are blue (it does look sort of cartoonish when you first see it, but hey, it's code-compliant and actually seems to be a major improvement over metal & PVC). You do have to support the lines since they're not rigid, but it's not that difficult & the PEX was easy to run through the existing holes cut in the floor joists that the old galvanized lines ran through. Kitchen got new plumbing, but the bathroom was not replumbed (the shower access was blocked by too much junk and is something either I can do or one of my home construction buddies can do - PEX rocks!), and the bathroom sink, well, um, there is no access to the plumbing behind the sink where the service lines run. To open it up you either go through the tile on the bathroom wall or through a pretty bad plaster wall in a bedroom. Since that's on the long list of home repairs to eventually complete, I thought I'd leave that level of plumbing for the time that wall comes down (those plans are for future entries). And yes, nothing has been done for the upstairs plumbing, but it would have been another couple thousand dollars I didn't have free at the time, and since there isn't good access to the upstairs plumbing I though it would wait until I have the chance to actually build intentional access points rather than using a sledgehammer & recip saw to make access points when they were needed.