Quatrefoil Window... IN!!

Don't have much time, so I will try to ramble much less than normal...

Long story short, our first meeting with the stucco/stone/cantera guys got cancelled this morning because some lunatic ran a red light and almost killed him and his crew... They were fine, but shaken up a bit.  We are happy to arrange that for a later date.

Ok, so I was tired of looking at the quatrefoil window in my garage, so I decided to install it today while we were waiting around doing other stuff.  I have no idea why I was waiting, and it's not  urgent, but I thought the time available in my day about matched the job.  For once I was right...

The window was cut from a material called AZEK, which is a cellular PVC material that is pretty much a soft workable plastic.  It was powder coated in Bahama Brown, and then fitted with a double pane tempered glass.

The opening is 11 inches deep, but the window is only 4 9/16" deep from the flange to the back frame of the window.  The idea here is to deep recess the window so that the stucco guys can form a 3 dimensional carved stucco return back to the window.  This I think will make a great feature on the front of the house.  It's really a cool shape. 

Here we go...  First, I added blocking all around the window accounting for the thickness of the plywood surrounds, so that the window would project into the room 1/2 inch, which is the thickness of the concrete backer board.  This will allow them to tile right up and around the window, and even inside the thing if we want.  This thing was a complete pain in the ....  to flash, so I won't even get into those details, but 3 steps gradually smaller, and the window is getting rain on the outside and a shower on the inside. 

I cut out some scrap 3/4 plywood, which was thicker than I needed, but free.  Scribed the window, and then cut out the quatrefoil.  Then I did this again.  Here is a test fit.

Now, I used window wrap to "face" the plywood on the exterior.  This stuff makes a mess out of a knife, it's like cutting partially dried glue.

Test fit the window...then walk away so you can take a picture, then realize you are really stupid for leaving the window up there attached to nothing... geez.

Caulk the window flange, caulk the plywood to the opening... heck, just caulk everything.  I used 2 entire tubes.  Flash the crap out of everything, and then caulk and flash some more.  Step back and take another picture.

From this picture you can see how deep the window is recessed.  I think it's 8 inches from the face of the ICF back to the window.

Cool shape and shadows on the inside. 

Finished shot on the inside. Only thing I am unhappy about is that the finished window only sits back 3/8 of an inch rather than 1/2 inch on the inside. I guess that will make a little crack that we can just caulk.

Now, for some nastiness...  Since I had the wheelbarrow out there (and a flat shovel), figured I would quickly scoop out the grime that had accumulated in the shower stalls.  They are the low point in the house during ICF and framing, and sawdust, nails, dirt, water, and all kinds of nastiness ends up in there.  I want them to dry out so we can clean them up.  2 entire loads of slop came from just 4 shower stalls.  It reminded me of growing up on a hog farm, where I shoveled this same consistency of material that smelled a lot worse, thousands of tons of it!!  (Ok, I maybe exaggerate a bit there, but it motivated me through college)

Glad to have that out of the house...but where do you put it??  It's watery slop that's full of nails...

One more thing.  I didn't give adequate credit to my lovely bride for shoveling out the remains of the concrete washout and hauling all that off.  They know her by name now at the dump.  Our board pile is starting to look realistic again...

Have a great week....  Aloha  ;-)

Some more plumbing...

Plumber ended up coming pretty late on Friday, and then again on Saturday.  They got the majority of the rough in work completed.  I didn't have the shower valves yet to rough in.

Here are a couple pictures of my manifold design, and their work...

The hot is red, cold is blue.  The whole assembly feeds from the left (from 1 inch lines), and the water passes through the manifolds and continues on to the other side of the house to the Master manifolds.  The small black manifold with the 4 blue lines is actually a return loop from a reverse osmosis system, which feeds to 4 places, both refrigerators and R/O faucets in each island.  The plastic manifold will hold up much better against the caustic effects of the R/O water, which is pretty corrosive.  The manifold doesn't have any valves, but I can shut down the entire R/O system from it's feed.

Any place you see a valve that is not in use is because we planned a couple of spares in case the valves fail or in case we need to add a fixture down the road.  I had not planned for a garage sink, but they plumbed one in, and fortunately I had the valves for that.

The gap from one hot manifold to the smaller hot manifold is designed to accept a Grundfos Hot water recirc pump, which I already own, but is in use in my current house.  I just measured the pump, and installed a blank section with a union so I can add the pump when we move in.  That pump "forwards" hot water to the far end of the house, and also to the island sinks, so that the water is already hot when you turn it on.  A side effect of this is that the manifolds themselves become precharged with hot water, so an individual user only has to wait for the hot water to come from the manifold, and not all the way from the hot water tanks (in the garage).  Most people run these pumps on a timer, so they don't consume energy and hot water all day long... BUT, my lighting control system will actually be in charge of that duty.  It will know when any bathroom or kitchen is in use by knowing the status of it's lighting.  So any time a bathroom or kitchen is in use, the lighting control system will activate a relay that powers the pump... Simple and efficient.

The manifold sits directly over the top of a glulam beam over the rec room, which otherwise would be in the way.  By being right on top of the beam, the plumbers could go either north or south of that beam without having to cut the beam, and also keeps things nice and tidy.  We are looking at the tubing headed North from the manifold.  My only problem here is that one of these bays I think gets a can light.  So we will probably have to move some things a little here...  I'm not sure how close a can light can be to plastic pipe, but I doubt the two get along very well...

Quiz time.  Anybody see a problem here??  I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they just didn't have the right connector to make the jog over.  This is the power room sink.  Also, when you are checking over your plumbing, make sure the drain and vent system has purple primer and glue at every joint.  Otherwise, it's not glued together...

By stubbing out all the sinks and toilets with the copper, we have a secure connection point that will (hopefully) never need to be serviced.  The supply valve itself will probably be a compression fitting to the copper with a 1/4 turn stop.  I may consider using a solder connection with a fitting to 1/2 inch pipe thread, but not sure.

This is how the islands are fed.  The PEX comes down through the kitchen wall, and into the conduit that they put in place prior to the concrete pour.  OH, the two blue lines there are R/O lines.  I put that conduit in myself just in case they needed the extra space.  I guess they did...  You can see the pipes sticking out of the concrete in the distance.

Pex manifold systems give you the advantage of being able to shut down any fixture that is giving you issues.  For example, your master shower valve has gone bad, so rather than shut down the whole house while waiting for a new valve, you can simply take that fixture out of service with a 1/4 turn of the appropriate manifold valve... 

Also, say your 16 year old daughter is taking an amazingly long shower.  Well, you don't have to "end" her shower, but you can certainly "end" her "hot" shower.  This is another reason to keep the master bathroom manifolds out of reach of your children, as eventually they will demand revenge.

OH, and never, under even emergency circumstances, attempt to cut short a wife's shower.  Her lack of hot water makes for too much hot water for you...

In the Master area now, actually right on the rear wall behind the master toilet.  There will be a cabinet there, and I figured we could just put a little access door in the cabinet to get to these manifold.  Well, they put the cold way over to one side from the hot, so now I am thinking two doors.  I swear if I'm not standing right there, this is the kind of stuff that happens.  The manifolds were supposed to be right next to each other.  Oh, the blank valves also need some pex run from them and up into the attic, and then terminated with a plug.  If somebody were to accidently open that little valve, the wall would get blasted with water.

This is one of the tricky things about working with ICF.  The foam has to be cut away to make access channels for plumbing and electrical.  In this case, you can see the drain for a sink, with it's vent above, and then the pex lines coming from the supply (left) to the two master shower valves, as well as another sink.

Picture above here... This is the master shower.  If you zoom in, you can see they crammed the pex around the corner there pretty good, and then jammed a nail guard pretty hard over the top of things.... hmmmm...

Ok, another quiz.  I debated showing this to you, but somebody out there needs to know...  You CAN NOT kink pex tubing and leave it that way.  It greatly weakens the wall of the tubing, and someday can burst.  The red pipe here has been kinked, and still is kinked.  Pex is amazingly tough, but the stress in a kinked joint is more than it can handle.  There are two ways to deal with this.  Heat it up with a heat gun and work it back to shape, or replace the line.  I want to replace this line with another section of red... But, that would require me to open the last box of red 1/2 inch (300 feet) just for this bitty thing.  You can use the blue instead, because the blue and red PEX is exactly the same, but I am OCD about things like that... red is hot, blue is cold...  But that's 100 dollars worth of pex... grrrrr.  Oh, the other option is to put a splice in the pex with an inline coupling, but I would like to keep the connections inside walls to an absolute minimum...

I'll say it again.... Grrrrrrrrr.

My opinion about PEX pipe, though... Amazing.  Way better than cpvc, which I wouldn't even consider in an outhouse.  Copper is pretty good, but I think pex wins in the end (without factoring cost) because it is quieter, more resistant to chemicals, and the connections are very good.  Copper connections can appear fine, but water hammer can actually work a poor connection loose.  When you factor in the advantages of a manifold, cost saving of pex over copper, and the ease of installation, then pex is the hands down winner.  Now, that all being said, there are some union plumbers up north that just ain't going to ever like pex, because they have been using copper, and they get paid by the hour...

Tomorrow we are meeting with a painter, and also a stone/stucco/cantera guy.  I need to get some sleep.

One of our local Road Runners.  We love these guys because they eat snakes.... copperheads in our case are plentiful...