Heating Installation, Phase 4 (July 12 – 22, 2010)

Team Oamaru came back up for another two week stint during the height of winter and during a busy time for me & Bruce as we were in the midst of getting the Christchurch house, aka ‘Clyde Road’, on the market for sale.

Bruce, Ollie, and I found ourselves stuck in Christchurch for a week, making repairs on Clyde Road, while Kat and Pete head off to Wainui to continue work on the heating system.

Well, from a pictorial standpoint, it’s not going to look like a lot of work got done in those ten days, but from a technical engineering standpoint, heaps was accomplished.   Apparently the living room floor was laden with copious fittings and pipes which Pete fashioned and welded together and onto our Gourmet stove.  There will be four sets of copper pipes running from the stove up through the attic to the hot water cylinder basket and then throughout the house to all the radiators.  It’s quite a complicated thing to build, but Pete’s our guy to get this job done!

They also started connecting the hot water cylinders together.

And, the easy part, several of the radiators got mounted onto the walls.

So, all in all, a good round of work, but it felt, to me, like very little got done.  (I’m a visual kind of gal).  Everyone was starting to feel tired and in need of a break.   The group decided that Pete and Kat should take the month of August off as they had things they needed to take care of at home and we needed a bit of downtime to heal our weary bones and deal with our impending house sale.

So, the schedule slips even more, but hey, we’re actually staying warm through winter with the temporary stove, so we are in a better place than we were last year.  But here’s my latest guestimate of the schedule now:

• Phase 1: Demolition of existing infrastructure and installation of temporary stove  {March}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 2:  Opening up of kitchen/living room wall and installation of structural wall beam and installation of reinforcing beams in attic space  {April}  COMPLETED!
• Phase 3:   Installation of hot water cylinders and some of the radiators  {May}  {June}  PARTIALLY COMPLETED just a wee bit!  {July}  Kind of COMPLETED!
• Phase 4:   Installation of remaining radiators and piping {June} {July/August} {September}
• Phase 5:   Installation of Gourmet Cooker {July}  {August} {October}

Despite the schedule slip and a few dreary days, the sun came out for Kat’s birthday which we celebrated with bunches of bouquets made from the garden and a yummy cream-cheese frosting cake!    Life is still pretty darn good!