So I finally have a rather big update.... many smaller ones I need to post. Anyway last month our water bill was about 10,000 gallons higher than normal. I went under the house and was unable to find a large leak. The other day though I saw water coming up through the grass and running down the curb... and it finally wasn't raining for once.

And because of this I finally searched out the water meter that I couldn't find... wound up being under a lot of grass... that doesn't look good :(

Opened the cover and started pumping out water.

To find water was filling the meter box from the left side(closer to the house). I reached my hand through the hole created by the water and felt some pipes near the box and dug it up which made the water come out faster.

Finally got the water meter shut off and fund the elbow here cracked... Whoever put it in did not use primer on the pipe and used the cheapest, thinnest walled PVC :(

Luckily Lowe's was still open and I got some slip fittings and new pipe and an elbow and was able to glue it back together.

Although it was late at night, I had to bring this light out to work... anyone that drove by was going really slow to try and see what I was doing digging around in my yard :P

I wound up buying quite a bit of bottled water in case we couldn't use the water for a day or two but luckily when I turned it on the next day everything worked as normal. Just made sure I turned an outside faucet on first to make sure any dirt that got in the line was flushed out before going through the screens in the sink or the water heater.

Unfortunately I did find a small water leak under the home, it was leaking slow enough that the water was evaporating before dripping and calcium deposits were forming on the pipe. This means more time under the house... but hopefully more posts soon :P

And the shower broke :(

I guess I should be updating more as I'm doing but seem to be having trouble with that.
I went to replace the seals in the old Delta faucet in our bath/shower, somehow I managed to mess it up and water was leaking behind the wall afterwards. The drip from the faucet was gone though!

I guess I forgot to take a pic of how it looked before but this was after cutting out the supports for the old diverter/temp valve and bath faucet.

Heres with the new supports put in and the pipe connected to the shower head and tub faucet, still need to run the hot/cold water pipe to it.

Here's the part that goes through the wall to the tub faucet. Once it's through I glued a threaded fitting on that the tub faucet screws onto.

Here's the new valve with fittings, the owners before us put the shower head, tub faucet and escutcheon on but left the old valve in. After doing this I know why! The nice thing with this new valve is that you can control the temp and pressure separately, all you have to do is set it to the temp you like and turn the shower on and off, it will always stay at that temp which is nice.

Here it is almost ready. 

All done except the handle.

Attic closet Pt 1

So here's my attempt to turn part of the attic into a closet. The first part looks pretty good, next is to add a closet bar across the back and move the dressers to the opposite wall which includes moving a vent in the wall. At least it's cool right now as I have to go into the attic to do it.

I had to take notches out of the baseboard so the frame would fit flush against the wall. I figured this would be easier than trying to cut the pattern into the frame itself and if we ever pull the drywall and baseboard to better insulate the attic I won't have to reshape the frame for the new baseboard.

In the two outside boxes of the frame I used drywall anchors to hold the 1x2's to the wall then used 2.5" #6 wood screws to hold the frame to the 1x2s. I used flanges for the closet rod and one support in the middle that is held by the drywall for extra support.

Surge protector outlet

So I found these cool surge protector outlets from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Leviton-7280-W-Suppressor-Receptacle-Industrial/dp/B001FB64JE/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1320368004&sr=8-8
They function like a surge strip but without the clutter. I used one under the home for the gate opener to protect it.

So these are more pictures than are necessary but I was curious about how it hooked up before I bought it. You wire it the same as a normal outlet but if you want the ground to be isolated you just run a seperate grounding conductor back to the panel from this instead of using the one that goes to the other outlets on the circuit.

Dining room lighting

One more lighting update, I replaced the dining room light fixture too, it was too modern for the style of the home.

Here's some more scary old home wiring... eek. The stuff is rather brittle. I thought this would be an easy one, just unscrew the old cross bar and put in the new one... too bad on of the holes was stripped.

It would be best to replace the box completely but I thought that if I did that I would have to run some new wiring as the insulation on the old probably wouldn't hold up. Instead I drilled out the hole then tack welded a nut onto the back so a screw will go in like it used to. I made sure I covered the ceiling and wires and we emptied the room of furniture before this part... I'm sure it's not a recommended technique.

 The results turned out great though. This is another of the lights that my wife found online that are about the same age as the home.

Living room light

So it's been some time since my last post. Unfortunatly not too much more has been done but we do have some new lights up. We took the ceiling fan down in the living room and found the bracket for the fan was held up with 6 drywall screws into the ceiling, luckily they much have hit some of the wood lathe behind the old plaster ceiling otherwise it likely would have come down some time ago. You can see two sets of three screw holes spaced out, this was how all that was holding the fan up before.

 I had to make a bigger opening to mount a pancake box against the joist to hold the light fixture. This way it has better support and will make it much easier to change out the fixture in the future, I made sure it was rated for fans too! There were 4 lag bolts that hold teh box to the joist for support.

I found an old Moore Handley Homecenter ad from the 60s or 70s in the ceiling too and a pieice of screen.

 Bought a new ladder too, the one on the right was kind of scary to work on.

 Then we used a ceiling medallion to cover the big mess I made, you can see the box in the middle of the medallion.

Tada!

Circuit panel install

 Here's the new panel that's going in. Its a Square D QO series panel and breakers.

  Here you go, proof I actually did it myself.

 Much cleaner now that some wires that went no where or were no longer hooked up were removed. You can see the surge protector too, the white rectangle at the bottom of the breakers on the right side. Some more info on it can be found here: http://www.apelectric.com/Square-D-QO-Surge-Breaker-p/qo2175sb.htm, they sell it there too but I found it for less at my local Home Depot. It's meant as part of the total surge solution, I still need to use surge protectors on my electronics, this is supposed to knock the surge down to the level a surge strip can actually handle. Unfortunately while doing this I discovered the only ground my house has is the gas piping which is supposed to be connected to the ground system on the home but not used as the ground. I've purchased 4 ground rods, two for the home and two for the garage and will post an update once I get them installed.

 You can see some of those cables that went nowhere. Now I need to crawl under the house and remove them. Ugh. It's normal practice to just cut them off but since there are so many and I want to rewire some of the home it will make it easier on me in the future to take the extra time and actually remove them now.

So that's it for replacing the panel. I had been quoted $1250 by an electrician and purchased the box for $150 shipped brand new from eBay and the breakers and surge protector I got for $250 at the local Home Depot. Now I've got an extra $850 to go towards my other projects, yay! More work!