When we bought the house, we were aware of the leak in the drain of the tub.  We noticed it leaking into the basement from upstairs.  What we didn’t know was that it was eventually going to start leaking into the sun room shortly after we bought the house.  What was going to be held off a few weeks now needed immediate attention.

I sent this picture to Al and in a few days, once the renovation check cleared, he started work to see what the problem was.  Nicole and I had to go 3 days without showering and smelled like a couple of hippies, we couldn’t wait to shower!
    Al started in the bathroom, tearing apart the area of the tub to be able to see the pipes.  We couldn’t see the leak which meant it was in the floor.  This didn’t sound good.  He ventured into the sun room and cut out a small section of the ceiling where the leak was happening.  There sitting in the ceiling was a big drain pipe that was completely broken.  The owner of the house tried doing a terrible rig job on the pipe that was clearly meant as a temporary cover-up so that he could sell the house.  Super annoying but easier to permanently fix than to do what he tried doing.  He made an attempt to clog the break in the pipe with some foreign substance.  Fail.

Never a dull moment.

Al was able to repair the pipe and Nicole and I were able to shower.  It’s the little things you take for granted.
    This weekend we plan on continuing work in the sun room.  We are going to be doing a lot painting and window repair.  This will be time consuming and it will make it less tempting for us to go out to eat and waste money.  We spent a lot of money the past two weeks so this weekend we are taking it easy.   I plan on replacing another window pain and Nicole is going to do some priming so that we can paint the room.  Taking this house one room at a time is the only way to do this without losing focus and going mad.  Seeing as the sun room is the room we will spend the most time in, it made sense to make this our first priority.   Here are a few “before” pictures.

This has got to go…

   More pictures to come as we make progress!

    Something that I didn’t know was that if you have old wooden windows that need repair, your local family run hardware store will cut you new glass and even repair the windows.  Our sun room has 7 windows that all need attention.  They all have either cracked or broken glass along with pealing paint.  With new windows costing roughly $200.00 a piece, we needed to fix these windows up so that we could replace them gradually.  I measured the glass that I needed for the windows and then picked them up from the hardware store down the street.  Lets go in and see what we did!

“Ooh Coool”

This is no good.

    I removed both sashes from the frame by carefully taking off the molding around the window.  That was how these sashes were being held in place.  I then laid them on the floor and sanded them down.

The second piece pictured above was rough.  All of the wood holding together the little panes was rotted out.  I decided I was going to get rid of that wood and replace it with just one big window pane, like the other portion.  With some hand tools, I carefully removed the rotted wood.

After I got all of the old wood out, I sanded both sashes down the best that I could.  Nicole and I applied two coats each on each sash with some white, exterior semi-gloss paint. 

Once the paint dried, we placed the new glass into each sash carefully, and then inserted several push points around the glass to secure it in place.   I say carefully because my first attempt was a failure in that I held the glass wrong and it snapped, resulting in a dash back to the hardware store 15 minutes before they closed.  Total waste, but you live and learn.  The push points can be bought at your local hardware store for a few dollars.  When the glass was in place, we took our caulk gun and went around the glass with some window glaze to seal the deal!

Push points will secure the window in place.

    The window glaze takes about 2 hours to dry.  After that, you can carefully put your new windows back up!  Our first home project was a success.  We also replaced the cheap light on the porch with something a little bigger and better suited to the size of the house. 

And yes, we bought that special “bug away” yellow light bulb.  Thanks, Billy the Exterminator.  Ridiculous.  Amazing, yet ridiculous.