Bitter is on her way home now. This weekend wasn’t terribly exiting. There’s a lot of stuff I need to get done between now and the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. This weekend was spent replacing the hot-water baseboard heating units in my guest bedroom. Now that’s it’s over, I’m pleased with the results, but as with anything regarding this house, it was a fight.
For one, the new baseboards were a little higher, which meant I had to use a street elbow and sleeve to get the fitting to reach down a little farther. That was fine for the one site, but the other side needed a vent, so that required a little more fitting trickery. On the one side, the pipe was a little far from the wall than it needed to be, which necessitated bending the fins (which I hated doing) to put the cover on. The original installation had removed the fins in that area, which I didn’t understand. Now I do; they were covering a mistake. Par for the course in this house. I figured bent fins were better than no fins, so I just bent them and muscled the cover on.
We also had a little complication with the soldering. I tried to do one set of pipes, but the solder didn’t suck in like I would expect a well cleaned and fluxed joint to do. I had to break it up and redo it, at the cost of a copper coupling. My mistake may have been not getting the copper hot enough. It’s a struggle working in a tight area like that, and my dad’s torch is hot. Keep it one place too long and you’ll have a fire, or will bubble the paint on the new baseboard unit, and make it look like crap. Neither option was attractive. But we got it done.
Next weekend I have to replace the master bedroom baseboard units. Fun! All this needs to be done before it gets cold, and I need to turn on the heat. I have a few more weeks, at most, and one of those weekends is GBR, which I also have to get some stuff for, like, right now, after I submit this post.
Definitely not going to be able to get Ahab’s e-postal in, which I feel bad about, because I like that one. With shortened days, it’s getting harder to get range time. I’m way out of practice right now.