Replumb!

It's official: our house has been replumbed. With the exception of the copper lines to the kitchen sink and the tub, our house has been completely replumbed while we've lived here.  We're really lucky! Working with the local plumbing company has been a great experience, and we worked with the same person who plumbed our bathroom (rough in, progress, and finish!)... and fixed our toilet.

The trickiest part, for us, was the amount of access required to replace all the PVC supplies (PVC is great for drains, not great for potable water). The DIY plumbing from previous generations has had a few issues that will now all be in the past! But first, we had to open up most of the basement to fix it.

Planning ahead of time helped us get set up with where to open the ceiling, and since I built a lot of access panels into the work areas, this process was a lot simpler than it could have been: the majority of our main was already below the library ceilings or behind an access, and the soffit around the new hall storage opens as well. Overall, I only had to remove 7 of the bead board planks. And all but one were reusable!  I disassembled the soffit under the upstairs bathroom, and the plumber tucked the cold line for the tub inside.

The hardest part of the prep was figuring out where to store the things we needed to move: our climate-controlled storage closet was emptied for replacing the vertical section of our main next to the meter, and with plumbing running through the office the kid's room and bathroom had to absorb some temporary storage. Mostly paint! It did give me the opportunity to weed out our old colors for recycling.

The aftermath is great! Our plumbing is in better shape than it's been in years, and this project gave us yet another excuse to clean the often neglected areas of our house. The inspection did reveal one other issue that’s been nagging our house for a long time: our incoming water pressure was too high.  So, we needed to add a pressure regulator valve (PRV).

Residential water pressure should max out at 80 psi, and ours was at 96 psi. I didn’t think it was a huge issue… until it was fixed.  Now, we don’t have water coming at us so fast we have to turn service valves down… and the bidets are a lot more comfortable.  The tub doesn’t have a stubborn drip only fixed when the diverter is engaged, and gaskets and O-rings in our faucets should last a lot longer.  The only downside is the stock tank pool will take a bit longer to fill.  We can make that work!