basement progress

The in floor heating in the cement floor has been hooked up to the boiler and it's warm. Yeah!!! Also, Art put in the tubing in the ceiling so that our upstairs living room is also warm! These are amazing improvements. The floors in the living room are now quite comfortable–no longer are they freezing like they used to be! Of course the whole heating issue will be improved in another week when we get the front basement windows replaced…

W. B. Prettyman & Co furnished the planks that are under our maple floors in the living room. I'll have to check them out at the historical society–lumber suppliers from 1893!

For all you plumbing buffs out there, this is the sump pump pit. See the white bobber–it works like the float in the back of a toilet. When the water level rises, the float triggers the sump pump to turn on and it pumps the water out through the white pipe. Water can come in through the blue pipe–which is connected to drains under the concrete floor at the edges near the exterior walls.

This is the system of plumbing to get water out of the sump pump pit and in to our plumbing system. There's a cover on the sump pump pit normally, I just took it off for the picture.

Art built this system of copper piping to regulate pressure in the tubes for the heating system. We are going to have 3 thermostats so that the basement floors, the upstairs floors, and the basement bathroom radiator can all be controlled separately. If I were the type to show off I'd say we have zone heating 🙂

And we now have some fancy gauges that will read out the water pressure levels.

Coming up next week–Jack the mason will be here to brick up the basement door, one side window, and a big ol' hole in the chimney. Then the following week–framing. John has mentioned that I'm using complicated terms. Framing means all the wood work inside–building the walls and the stairs.