But cleaning up the mess wasn’t the issue. We got most of the trash out within a day and I had the electricity turned on before we even left NYC. The problem was that in order to have indoor plumbing, you need:
1. Reliable heat running for a day or two to thaw out the pipes, which requires either:
- Gas service and a gas heater or
- Lots of firewood
2. An appointment with the municipality, which can only be done Mon-Thurs 1–4pm
3. Functional fixtures & appliances including
- A hot water heater
- A functioning toilet
- A functioning faucet in the kitchen sink
As you can guess we had none of these. So we hit Craigslist to find firewood delivery and set up appointments with gas & water services to come by. Being the determined women that we are, once we had a few pieces of firewood, we set up a bed (and projector of course) by the wood stove and camped out.
It took a week to get the water turned on and thanks to a series of seemingly impossible to find gas leaks, we still don’t have gas service (although we did buy & install that gas heater!). Once the water was turned on, I went one by one through the fixtures.
The challenge with this sort of project is remarkably similar to every job I’ve had: sequencing tasks requires time & effort estimations as well as procurement planning. With no experience in any of this we spent a long time waiting, for example, for a matching Harvest Gold toilet bowl and an 8' butcher block counter top to be delivered. You find other things to do, but it isn’t going to be a matter of prioritization based on desire for, say, having a toilet in your home over having the floors done. Why? Because you need to take out the toilet to do the floors and before you do the floors you need to paint the walls but in order to paint walls in a house that’s been empty for 20 years you first need to redo the drywall seams and they take a few days to dry. Etc. Ad nauseam.
While waiting for said toilet bowl and drywall plaster, I dove into the water heater. Despite thinking I’d drained it, after pouring 30 gallons of ice cold water onto the kitchen floor, I discovered the problem:
The one on the left was what I took out, the right is the new one.
Once I replaced the element, it still didn’t work though so we continued our once-per-week trip to the local truck stop for a shower and a fish fry until my uncle (an electrician and all-around home repair genius and full-time farmer aka extremely busy man) could come by. We also managed to drywall & paint the bedroom, clean up the living room and get all of the boxes into their respective places. I think all in all it took a full two weeks to get the bathroom plumbing completely together and I can happily say I am no longer walking across the street to the fire station to use the bathroom AND my Harvest Gold toilet bowl almost matches the original tank from ‘77. Although, yes that tank is on backwards.
