It's-a me! Mario!

Actually, our plumber is neither Italian, nor mustachioed. We tried to find one, but there just aren't any available in our area.

Before the plumber could come and rough in the new pipes, we had to cut the ceiling out downstairs so they could access the plumbing above. Kinda strange, but there you go. I would've thought they'd go through the floor, but apparently the floor pieces are pretty key to the structural stability of the house so pulling large swaths of them out is a bad idea.

First, we start taping up the plastic to contain the giant dust plume that will invariably result from pulling down a big chunk of ceiling.

We sealed the area off pretty effectively, I think. it wasn't perfect, but it definitely contained the majority of the dust in this little bubble.

We're slowly taking out pieces of the ceiling to see where the joists are.

Now we're quickly taking out pieces to open it up for easier access. We could've gotten away with taking down less, maybe, but since we also want to run new electrical and change the location of the HVAC, this will make it easier on everyone.

This is the original plumbing.

This is the new plumbing. You can see we moved everything around and added some new stuff. The plumber used the plastic supply lines instead of copper and it sounds like they're pretty cool. They're faster to put in, cheaper, and even more durable than copper is, especially when it comes to freezing. He said he's seen then expand from 1/2" ID to over an inch when frozen and the don't burst. I like the sound of that.

Here are the new lines in the master. You can see where the shower is going, since the floor drain and supply lines are in there now.

Here's the vanity wall. I asked him to move the vent pipe from the wall on the right where is was before over to the back wall so the space on the right would be available for a medicine cabinet. Everything looks pretty well set. We'll have our two sinks there, and we're working on our cabinet layout now. I'm thinking we'll go with two 27" wide vanities with a 15" drawer stack between them. That leaves us some space on either side to use as filler so we don't have to worry about it if the walls aren't perfectly square.

So there we go! We're almost ready to start getting the last of the trade work done in here. We just need an electrician to come in and help us out, and the plumber is going to move the vent for us, since he also does HVAC work. He had a really great idea for it, too. We were having a very hard time figuring out how to get it all the way across the floor to a place where it wouldn't be in the way all the time. There's something called a "micro" running right through the middle of the space, and you can't pop a 6" hole through it. It's doing something silly like holding the house up or whatever. So what the plumber suggested was having the HVAC come up into the bottom of the center drawer stack and make the kickplate into the vent output. it'll push warm air out where we need it most and should be a pretty easy adjustment to make to the cabinet. Woot!

I'll try to keep the updates coming more regularly as we get stuff figured out. We're moving pretty quickly now! Thanks for reading.