Water’s back on, plumber is packing up, nothing seems to be dripping. Time for lunch.
Today, there was tension in places other than the cables running through the pre-stressed concrete floors of Hale Kihei. It’s important to point out that this had nothing to do with the quality of work or the job the plumber was doing; it’s just that I’m a serious worry-wort when it comes to this kind of stuff in the condo. First there was the noise. To remove the tub, it had to be cut into pieces with a Sawz-all and edge grinder and making cuts it a porcelain-coated steel tub was, I think, the noisiest thing I’ve ever heard at Kamaole Sands. Once the tub was gone there was a good half hour of impact racket. The plaster of Paris around the old drain had to be chipped out and some of the concrete at the edge of the opening needed a little “dressing” with a jack hammer.
If the racket wasn’t enough, at one point in time there was considerable doubt about being able to fit a shower P trap in the hole that had been occupied by the old bath drain. In poured concrete structures laced with steel cables, you frequently wind up in situations where you don’t have a lot of options and if we couldn’t make room for the trap, our choices were pretty much limited to installing a new tub or filling the old tub space with a pinball machine and doing away with all bathing facilities in that WC. Neither of those choices seemed appealing.
My third trip around the worry beads came from a five gallon bucket the plumber had used to drain the pipes. At one point in time, it was suspended from the old valve set and I could just see it falling off, tipping over and dumping 3+ gallons of water through the newly-opened hole in the floor that leads to the ceiling of the shower of our neighbors below. Plumber completed his tasks without spilling a drop, the new fixtures are water tight and I need a beer.
Today’s pictures:
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